Wren
My hand reached for Elspeth before my eyes opened. Habit. But I only found empty sheets. Wrong bed. Wrong light. Wrong smell of cedar and stone instead of mildew and my uncle’s tobacco smoke.
I sat up too fast, heart slamming, and then I remembered.
The monster. The flight. The way he’d looked at me in the hallway like I was something he couldn’t stop staring at.
I pressed my hand flat against my chest and made myself breathe. Counted the beats until they slowed. Told myself I was safe. That this was better than the alternative. That I’d made the right choice.
Someone had left clothing on the chest at the foot of the bed. A shift of soft linen, finer than anything I’d ever owned. A simple dress in deep blue wool. Underthings. Even stockings.
I touched the shift. The fabric was so light it felt like holding air.
He’d thought of this. While I slept, he’d thought about the fact that I had nothing. That I’d arrived with only the dress on my back. And he’d found these things and left them where I’d see them first thing.
I changed quickly, folding my old dress and setting it aside. I wasn’t sure why I kept it. Sentiment, maybe. Evidence that I’d been someone else before this.
There was food outside my door.
A tray on the stone floor. Bread still warm from the oven. Cheese. Dried fruit. A pot of dark honey and a knife to spread it with. Everything arranged with a precision that made my chest hurt. Each item placed exactly parallel to the others. The knife at a perfect right angle to the bread.
No note. No instructions. Just evidence that he’d been awake before dawn, arranging food for me like it mattered where the honey pot sat.
I ate standing at the window because I couldn’t sit still.
The honey was wild and dark, nothing like the thin stuff from market stalls, and I kept thinking about his hands.
How carefully they must have placed that knife.
How those same hands had trembled last night when he’d buckled me against his chest.
The Aerie was a maze of empty rooms.
I wandered through corridors carved into the mountain itself, trailing my fingers along cold stone, opening doors that I suspected hadn’t been touched in decades.
Dust on the floors. Furniture draped in cloth gone gray with age.
The particular silence of spaces that had given up waiting for someone to fill them.
All those empty rooms. All that silence. I found the library by accident and stopped breathing.
Books. Thousands of them. The chamber was vast, ceilings disappearing into shadow, and every surface was covered. Floor to ceiling shelves. Stacks on tables. Piles in corners. Books spilling off chairs and heaped against walls and crammed into spaces too small for them.
I walked forward without deciding to. My hand found a spine. Leather, cracked with age, gold lettering in a script I didn’t recognize. I opened it and the pages were brittle but intact, filled with flowing handwritten text that might have been three centuries old.
I put it back. Pulled another. A treatise on astronomy, printed in Common Tongue.
Next to it, poetry in Old Imperial. Next to that, a cheap novel with a woman fleeing a castle on the cover.
Elspeth would have loved this one. She’d always begged me to read her the dramatic parts twice, with me acting out the voices until she laughed so hard she couldn’t breathe.
I hadn’t read to her in years. Hadn’t had time. Hadn’t had books.
Next to that, someone’s personal journal, leather worn soft from handling.
No organization. No system. Languages and eras and subjects all tangled together like someone had simply acquired them and shoved them wherever they would fit.
And then I noticed the shelf by the window. All the books were arranged by color. Deep reds fading into burgundy fading into rust fading into orange fading into gold.
A perfect gradient, spine to spine. I pulled one out. Written in a language I’d never seen before. Another. Different script. Another. Another.
Why would someone organize books by color?
I found the bestiary on a lower shelf, wedged between a water-stained atlas and an old cookbook. Old leather, cracked spine, illustrations done in faded ink.
I almost missed the entry. Just a paragraph, tucked between “Salamanders, Greater” and “Sphinxes, Desert.” But the word caught my eye: Roc.
The Sky Jewel, the text read, is produced once in a Roc’s lifetime, crystallized from their own magical essence during their first century of maturity.
The process is said to be painful, lasting several days, and the resulting gem contains a fragment of the Roc’s life force.
For this reason, Sky Jewels are never sold or traded lightly.
To gift one is to gift a piece of oneself.
I thought about the auction. The auctioneer’s pale face. The way Sorley had decided I wasn’t worth dying for.
Tavrin had given a piece of his soul for me.
I flipped through the remaining pages. Nothing else on Rocs. No mention of bonding, of claiming, of what it meant to give a piece of your soul to a stranger at auction.
I closed the book carefully.
“You found the books.”
I spun. He filled the doorway, silent as smoke, watching me with those amber eyes. I hadn’t heard him approach.
“How long have you been there?”
“A few minutes.”
“That’s unsettling.”
“I know.” He didn’t apologize. Didn’t explain. Just watched me, like I was a book in a language he was trying to learn.
“These are organized by color,” I said, gesturing at the window shelf.
His jaw tightened. “Yes.”
“Why?”
His fingers curled and uncurled.
“It is all I can see in them,” he said finally. “I cannot read most of them.”
“How many can you read?”
He looked at the shelves. At the thousands of volumes crammed into every available space. “Perhaps one in five. Perhaps less.”
I waited.
“Reading requires teaching.” The words came slowly.
“I have been alone a very long time. The traders who sometimes came to the mountain’s edge.
.. they wanted to sell, not to teach. And I.
..” He stopped. Started again. “I kept buying. I kept thinking, someday. Someone would come. Someone would read them to me.”
The weight of that settled into my chest. Collecting words he couldn’t decipher. Building a library for a person who hadn’t arrived yet.
“Then why do you have them?”
The silence stretched. His hands flexed at his sides, that tell I was starting to recognize. The one that meant he was holding something back.
“I do not know,” he said finally. “When I see a book, I feel... compelled. To bring it here. To keep it.” He stopped. His jaw worked. “I have been doing this for a very long time. I have never understood why.”
“That’s hoarding.”
“Yes.” No defense. No excuse.
“That’s not healthy.”
“No.”
I should have left it alone. Should have made a polite noise and changed the subject. Instead I heard myself say: “Do you hoard other things? Or just books?”
His eyes met mine and held. Something was happening in them. That flicker in his pupils, the one I’d first seen at the market.
“I did not,” he said slowly. “Before.”
“Before what?”
He didn’t answer. But his fists clenched and unclenched, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at the books. Like I was something he needed to keep.
I turned back to the shelves because I couldn’t hold his gaze anymore.
“I’m going to organize this,” I said. “It’s going to take months. Maybe years. But I’m going to put every single book in a system that makes sense.”
“You do not have to.”
“I know. I want to.” I pulled a book off a lower shelf. Heavy, leather-bound, illustrations on thick pages. “I need supplies. Paper, ink, something to write on. And I’ll need you to tell me which languages you can read so I know how to sort them.”
“I will get them.”
He left. I started examining the shelves, trying to understand the scope of the chaos, and before I’d finished a single wall he was back.
Paper. Ink. A lap desk. Three different pens.
“Is this sufficient?”
“Yes, but I didn’t need three different pens.”
He was already gone.
He came back with cushions. Two of them, silk-covered, deep blue.
“For the chair,” he said. “The wood is hard.”
“Tavrin, I don’t—”
Gone again.
A blanket. Wool, thick, the color of storm clouds.
“The stone floor is cold. You will want this.”
“I’m not cold.”
He draped it over the chair anyway and disappeared.
A pitcher of water. A cup. A plate of food I hadn’t asked for.
I watched him arrange them on the small table he’d brought three trips ago. His movements were careful. Precise. That same rigid exactness I’d seen in the breakfast tray.
“You don’t have to keep bringing me things.”
“I know.” He straightened. Looked at the arrangement. Adjusted the cup slightly. “I will return.”
“Tavrin.”
He stopped in the doorway.
“I mean it. Stop bringing things.”
He stood very still. I watched his hands open and close at his sides. Watched his shoulders tighten. Watched something ripple across his face that looked almost like pain.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”
He left.
I went back to work. I told myself I was relieved. Told myself the constant interruptions had been breaking my concentration. Told myself this was better.
Twenty minutes later I heard movement in the doorway.
He was standing there with a footstool in his hands. His expression was somewhere between apologetic and anguished.
“I tried,” he said. “I cannot seem to stop.”
I should have been annoyed. Should have told him to leave, to give me space, to stop hovering. But he looked so wrecked. Standing there with a footstool he didn’t know why he’d brought, staring at me like he was waiting for me to tell him he was broken.
“Why?” I asked. “Why can’t you stop?”