Chapter 29
29
I wait in the common room, ridiculously nervous.
Not helping matters, Erik is practicing his smolder in the mirror while the clock inches closer to eight, the dauntless minute hand carrying me ever closer to the not-date-okay-possibly-date. I attempted to read for distraction, and again, not even The Exile Court could call my mind from the uncertainties of Scott.
I realize I’m tapping my foot when Erik drops his Val demeanor and gives me a pained glance. “Please,” he reprimands with artistic gravitas, “I need quiet to smolder.”
Although I return his impatient, you’re-really-pushing-it look, I still my foot. “A real Val can smolder under any circumstances,” I inform him primly.
Erik is unamused by my critique. He lights the smoky-sweet leather-scented candle on the dresser, which he has commented on a couple occasions helps him capture his character’s mindset. It is one of the parts of his process on which I have no complaints—I honestly love the scent.
“Since you’re just sitting there nervously waiting for a date at the library with your coworker you claim to hate”—his judgment thicker than candle smoke—“can’t you at least be my scene partner in the meantime?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
“Come on,” he pleas with the pouty persistence of a man not used to hearing no , which admittedly he probably rarely does. “We can do any scene you want. I saw you reading Exile earlier. We could do the one where the ladies-in-waiting catch Val asking Kethryn’s cat whether he should ask her mistress to the masquerade.”
“I will only perform the one where the Vengeant Men capture you on the journey into the Realms Past,” I say.
Erik’s brow furrows with recollection. “Val is unconscious for that scene!” he whines.
“Exactly.”
He eyes me reproachfully. “I’m going to blast ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ while you and Scott are trying to get it on tonight.”
I gasp. Not only at the horrible cruelty of his promise—also the, um, other insinuation. While I’ve maybe accepted this is a date, I’ve restrained myself from imagining what might happen after the library. I don’t want to overdose on fantasy.
Just then, there’s a knock on the door.
I look up. The clock reads eight p.m. exactly. It’s very him. Assuming it is him.
When I open the door, I find Scott waiting. He’s not in Elytheum costume. Instead he’s dressed smartly, in a white knitted sweater and brown pants. While I very much enjoyed costume Scott, I’m definitely not mad about it.
“Hi,” Scott says.
I love every word of Val’s darkly delicious wordplay, every passion-aching pronouncement of his deeply felt declarations of love.
How is it, then, that hi is the most romantic word I’ve ever heard when spoken in the right voice, from the right mouth?
“Hi,” I say.
Scott smiles. Not smirks, not exactly, although there’s starlight in his eyes. Like he’s promising something, and neither of us is sure what just yet. “You ready?” he asks.
“Scott, thoughts on ‘Cotton Eye Joe’?” Erik interjects.
Scott frowns in understandable incomprehension. Eager to usher the moment forward, I step into the doorway with him.
“I’m ready,” I say.
Scott’s smile returns. “Good,” he replies.
“ Good night , Erik,” I reply very pointedly over my shoulder.
I close the door, and we head into the hallway. Scott nods in the direction of my impudent roommate. “What was that about?”
“Nothing good,” I assure him.
We continue into the stairwell. “How was the rest of your day?” Scott asks me with casual kindness, obviously unaware of what a coil of nerves he’s wound me into.
“Laurel and I worked on our costumes for the masquerade. What about you?” I ask, avoiding confessing and also I watched the clock for an hour waiting for you .
“I had some work to catch up on,” he says. “And otherwise, I was anticipating this.”
I can’t help the shy smile that springs to my face. I guess I could have admitted to anticipation of my own after all. “I hope it lives up,” I say.
Swinging open the stairwell door for me, Scott grins. “I think that’s my line.”
I laugh. We walk down the stairs and into the warm evening, the campus lights golden in the darkness. The illuminated pathways feel like possibilities for the night—I don’t know where they’ll lead us. “And what exactly do you want to live up to?” I ask softly, playfully. “Would you care for a recap and evaluation at the end of the night?”
Scott smiles. “In a manner of speaking. Feedback comes in many forms,” he replies.
His line is perfectly flirtatious, but still I don’t know what this is to him. Another data point for the notebook? A fantasy he’s conjuring for practice? Are we on our way to experimental nocturnal library perusing?
With effort, I push the doubts from my mind. Enjoy this , I remind myself. Whatever it is .
Scott guides us to the north end of the Hollisboro campus. Or, I think it’s the north end. It feels northerly. Without my familiar landmarks, however, my sense of direction is once more failing me. Scott could be leading us to the parking lot, for all I know.
Until—there. The library.
It emerges past the archway we walk through. It’s not the grandest building on campus, nor the largest or most decorated. Its Gothic tower doesn’t reach higher than the surrounding rooftops. Nevertheless, there’s…something hallowed here. Hushed invitation in the night air. The cicadas’ hum is muffled, the murmur of traffic farther away.
Scott leads us up the front steps.
“Are we allowed in?” I ask, the logistic occurring to me for the first time. “Isn’t it for students only?”
“One of the cool things about doing half of a PhD,” Scott explains, “is having friends in academic places. I pulled a few strings to get us passes.” When we reach the grand doors, he pauses to pull two name tags from his wallet. Scott Daniels. Jennifer Worth. He presents mine with chivalric flourish.
“Wow,” I say, with playful overemphasis of my real admiration. “This is way better than impossible-to-get dinner reservations.”
Scott smiles. “I know.”
Quickly he clasps my hand in his, and I cover my reaction to the exhilarating sweetness of the contact. Scott Daniels is holding my hand like it’s nothing. Experiment or not, it’s…nice. My hand in his, we enter the library.
It’s quiet, close to empty in the summer night. Lights illuminate the stone anteroom, stretching out shadows suitable for getting lost in. Similar to the quad outside, the silence is inviting. Welcoming. The only people here look to be a handful of grad students preparing for all-nighters. I even notice pillows propped up in the occasional carrel.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
“We’re on a date,” Scott replies. “It may not be what you had in mind a year ago, but I think we can both agree we’re not here to be friends.”
Knowing his evasion is intentional, I roll my eyes even while my stomach flutters. While he’s answered the question I’ve spent the afternoon fretting over, he hasn’t answered the one I just actually asked. “Unusual date activity for me,” I comment.
“Sort of the point,” he returns. Dropping his coyness, he rubs my knuckle idly in our clasped hands. “I…want this to be the sort of thing you read about, Jen. Come on.”
He draws us forward. I don’t hesitate or ask more questions. Surprises have a sacredness when prepared with kindness, and I want Scott to unveil his in exactly the way he envisions.
Our footsteps sounding softly on the polished marble, Scott leads us into the stairwells descending into the stacks. I feel an irresistible giddy anticipation swell in me, and not just due to Scott’s careful and mysterious efforts. I love university libraries. Their intricacy, their enormity, their unusual architecture accommodating generations of expansion and renovation. Labyrinths of learning sprawling out in every direction—including downward, where we continue, the flights of stairs offering glimpses of rows and rows of subterranean shelves.
We descend, and I have literally no expectation of where the library will lead us. Rare manuscripts confined in glass walls? Ooh, or a cozy reading room full of my favorite stories? We go minutes now without glimpsing another person. I hold Scott’s hand, my curious heart picking up its pace.
Until we reach what is, without question, our destination.
The atrium reaches down into the ground, and up, with open balconies rising all the way to skylights in the ceiling. Scott has even set up small electric “candles” everywhere, surrounding us . In the low-lit space, they smatter the shelves like the starlit night has somehow spilled inside. It’s stunning. It’s magical.
I look to Scott, awed and wondering. Rationally, I know what’s in front of me is his work. I just can’t fully reconcile it with the guy who told me he didn’t daydream. He certainly knows how to conjure them up.
Finally I find my voice. It’s hushed, and not only because we’re in a library. “This is…unreal.”
Scott grins.
“Like I said,” he replies, with soft charm, “sort of the point.”
He releases my hand to reach into his pocket, from which he produces—the scroll, the clue I recognize from our memorable early-morning horse ride. When something playful enters his eyes, my stomach tightens in anticipation.
“The next clue,” he explains, unrolling the parchment, “is a code. Here.” He hands it to me and he continues. “I knew it was the library pretty easily. Took me a little longer to understand the mechanism. When I did…”
He shrugs shyly, as if to say, Well, here we are .
I read the clue in the false candlelight.
Where you find me, Lord Everbane, you find your reward, in the place where all knowledge resides. In the volumes of the start and end of our story, add each numbered page where in darkness, light is found. Two numbers, one clue.
I understand Scott’s library deduction. The clues have led us from where knowledge continues —the graduate college—to the place where all knowledge resides, the main college library.
And I recognize the words hiding in the description. Where in darkness, light is found . It’s not a metaphor. “In darkness, light,” is Val’s friend Everbane’s motto, uttered often to Val and Kethryn. Otherwise…
“ Add each numbered page . Page numbers,” I exhale, starting to understand. “Literal addition. You’re supposed to take certain page numbers and add the numerals together.”
“Page numbers,” Scott repeats. “Like, say, the numbers of pages on which a certain character utters a certain memorable phrase.”
“ Where you find me, Lord Everbane, you find your reward. Where in darkness, light is found ,” I recite. “We’re looking for the numbers of the pages where that quote appears.”
Scott leads me down the stairs to the ground floor of the atrium. We’re near the general fiction shelves, hence the room’s grandeur, I guess. On the table, surrounded by his electric candles, this man has assembled the library’s Elytheum Courts copies.
Not the entire series. Scott has produced two copies—I’m pleased but not surprised to note the library has duplicates—of The Shattered Court and The Risen Court , the first and final volumes.
“ In the volumes of the start and end of our story ,” I repeat. “The first and last books of the series—that’s where we’re searching. And when we add up the page numbers where Lord Everbane’s quote appears…”
Following my logic, Scott practically hums with anticipation. “We would end up with two numbers. One for Shattered , one for Risen . Two numbers, one clue . Here, in the place where all knowledge resides. And what”—he asks excitedly, and I have a glimpse of Professor Scott—“do you do with two numbers in a library?”
As he goes on, I understand the pieces he’s putting into place.
“The Dewey decimal system,” he explains, with the nerdy delight of someone who really did enjoy his years in academia. “A library is just a code with walls. Dewey uses one three-digit number, and then a decimal, and then another number. It’s a scavenger hunt within a scavenger hunt,” he summarizes proudly.
He moves to the table, where he unstacks the copies of Shattered and Risen .
“Using our knowledge of the series,” he continues, “we have to find every page in each of these books where Everbane says ‘In darkness, light.’ Add up one set of page numbers for our first number, then the other for our second number, and we’ll find a Dewey decimal number in this library,” Scott concludes. “In these very stacks.”
“Wait.” Scott may have experience in academia, but Jennifer Worth, the former number-one patron of the YA section of the Southern Oaks Library in Oklahoma City, knows her own way around the Dewey decimal system. “A Dewey decimal number only gets you into the right section. How will we know what book we need?”
Scott nods like he anticipated the question. “I have a feeling we’ll know, somehow. Remember the clue in the West College statue? Nothing about this scavenger hunt is random. Everything is planned. We’ll know when we get there. And when we do…”
He pauses, and I realize it’s as far as he’s gotten—or let himself go.
“We’ll find the final clue,” he finishes with intrepid joy.
I feel it with him.
Until confusion cuts into the pounding of my heart when I realize what’s just happened. Scott, who outran me on an obstacle course, who outwitted and outflirted me in the rain, has just explained how to solve his final clue. He’s led me right to the solution.
I ask the obvious question. “You’re telling me this why? ”
Scott places one hand on the copies of The Shattered Court , steepling his fingers. He looks down, shyness stealing some of his enthusiasm, and underneath it, something else. His own cipher, written in sweetened ink.
“Because this game is only fun when I’m playing against you,” he admits.
Quietly I wonder whether he’s just confessed to something I never expected. I figured nothing except simple one-upmanship and a pattern of pettiness kept our rivalry continuing. Does Scott find the competitiveness, the drive to outdo each other…fun?
Do I?
Instead of asking him, I pick up one of the copies of The Risen Court . “You want to race,” I clarify.
He raises an eyebrow—just one.
“What do you say?” he asks, quietly exhilarated, like he hears the pounding of hope himself. “Up for a challenge?”
I step closer to him.
He swallows.
Reaching up with my lips raised, I brush my mouth softly against his. While his eyes flutter shut—while I kiss him—I gently pull the scroll from his hands.
His eyes open, and he doesn’t reach for the clue I’ve claimed. His expression says he wishes I’d do it again and again.
“Game on, Daniels,” I say.