25. Library Management #2
Iseult smirked and threw her hair over her shoulder. “Right. Tell Lysanor her niece is here.”
The woman, sized us up, perhaps weighing her odds in a fight should the worst come to worst, then deflated.
“Of course,” she conceded. “Please wait here, miss…?”
“Lady Iseult of Tulyr.”
The woman nodded and hurried back down the massive corridor.
I craned my neck to take in the marble floor, pillars, and darkening sky. The veins of Skal-formed opal in the Great Willow glowed against the oncoming night.
“We’re in the library. Have you found an exit yet?” I asked Ciarán in my head.
“Almost. Hurry, Wren. Things at the Northern Gate were getting heated by the time we left.”
“Let me do the talking.” Iseult’s voice cut into my mental conversation with Ciarán. “She’s family, so she’s most likely to listen to me.”
“But you’ve never met her,” Orla clarified.
“No,” Iseult admitted. “It’s been so long since she left Tulyr, she doesn’t even know I exist.”
The heavy doors at the end of the entrance hall opened again and an old woman strode out, chased by the woman who had greeted us.
This new woman’s white braid wrapped around her head like a crown, and small orbs of silver light floated on the air around her.
Green silk robes embroidered with silver embellishments caught the skal-light, their pattern reminding me of the veins of opal in the Great Willow.
The woman carried herself with grace and strength but her tanned face betrayed her age. Galahad was etched in every wrinkle and the shape of her nose, though hers had a slightly more gentle curve to it.
“The city is under siege, and the library is closed,” the woman thundered, “so why is Taj telling me someone claiming to be my niece is here to see me?”
Iseult lowered herself to her real knee in a bow. “Lady Lysanor—”
“Get up,” Lysanor snapped. “Who are you really, and why are you here?”
Iseult remained on her knee with her head bowed so that her white hair obscured her face, but Orla stepped forward and offered her hand.
“We’re with the Riftguards, and we are seeking information that will help us reseal the Frozen God.” Orla kept her hand extended even when Lysanor ignored it.
“If Galahad sent you, you can tell that arrogant toe fungus—”
“Galahad’s dead,” I cut in.
Lysanor’s eyes widened, but she maintained her composure with her hands tucked into her bell-like robe sleeves. “I suppose he would be. The man would’ve been over seventy by now. And who are you, then? A Quillguard or Eldguard?”
“A Saergrim.”
She cocked her head, and her lip curled in either cold interest or disdain—I couldn’t tell which.
“Our citadel is under siege because of you.” A green blast overhead punctuated the words.
Emerald light spilled across the polished floor, and debris from the Great Willow rained on the glass ceiling overhead.
Lysanor remained unflinching at the center of her floating lights.
“I admit, you aren’t quite how I imagined the Frozen God. ”
“Because I’m not the Frozen God.”
“I promise you, Lady Lysanor,” Iseult interjected, still on her knee, “she is not a threat. Her skills are woefully underdeveloped. You have nothing to fear from her.”
“Didn’t I tell you to get up?” Lysanor turned her curled lip towards Iseult.
“The library is closed until the threat outside passes, which I’m to understand isn’t going to happen until your friend here gets handed off to the mountain army.
So no, I’m sorry. I can’t help. Get out of my library before I alert the authorities myself. ”
Lysanor’s robes swirled around her ankles as she whipped around to exit back the way she came. Taj stepped forward, presumably to see us out, but Iseult climbed to her feet to shout after her aunt.
“We’re trying to help! The Rift is open. We want to close it!”
Lysanor kept her back to us but stopped to deliver a cold laugh at the windowed ceiling.
“I left Tulyr fifty years ago because I saw what happened firsthand when Magicians meddle with the Rift.”
“Balin was wrong to try to free the Frozen God,” Iseult agreed, “but my grandfather fought to defend Tulyr—”
“People died that night because of your grandfather.” Lysanor turned back around. “Tulyr fell anyway. My cousins, both Galahad and Balin, were failures who meddled with forces outside their own scope. We all suffered for it.”
She hitched up the hem of her robe to show off the valleys of scarred-over flesh that ran from her ankle and up her thigh before disappearing behind fabric.
“We’ve all suffered.” Iseult mirrored Lysanor and pulled at her cloak to reveal her skal-replaced leg and the halo of light it cast across the polished floor. “And Galahad died a hero.”
Lysanor exhaled heavily through her nose, glaring at Iseult’s faux leg.
“You didn’t say,” she sang, “how did he die?”
“He died protecting the Rift,” Iseult growled, dropping her cloak back over her leg. “And I won’t let that sacrifice be for nothing.”
Lysanor tutted.
“It sounds like it already has. The Rift is open. If you close it, some other Magician is going to come along eventually and sow havoc and heartbreak to open it once more.”
“Please,” Orla bowed. “Lady Lysanor, we are looking for Lady Lyria’s journal. Once we have the information we need, we’ll leave Willow’s Grave.”
“I’ll show you the journal,” Lysanor said with a smug lilt and finger raised to point at me, “if that one gives herself over to the army outside.”
“Done,” Iseult said, just as Orla cried out, “Absolutely not!”
All three of them turned to look at me.
It would work, of course. Iseult had been thinking it since discovering that’s what Caitria’s army was here for. I knew it from the moment we’d shared that glance in the textile plaza.
I’d been thinking it too.
We had a Saergrim to help close the Rift already. My mom was waiting in Keel Watch Harbor. They didn’t actually need me. They hadn’t ever. I was only here because I’d insisted on it.
I shook my head. “I have to go home. If I give myself up, the others will have to keep going without me. There’s not enough time—”
“Then no journal,” Lysanor asserted.
“I’ll never see my mom again!”
“Oh?” Lysanor’s wrinkled face contorted into one of false sympathy. “I haven’t seen my mother in fifty years because she was ripped apart by one of Balin’s rotsbane when he tried to open the Rift.”
“And now the Rift is open, which is what Balin wanted! We’re trying to fix that.”
“Did you let Galahad fill your pretty, young head with delusions of greater purpose and duty? He may be dead, but you’re all an extension of him and his addiction to dogma. Galahad—”
“I hated Galahad,” I seethed. Lysanor froze, and her eyes narrowed at me.
“He used people like tools. He used me like a weapon, the same way you want to use me to appease the army outside. Galahad used me, cursed me, and when I tried to save him, he called me a liar and a traitor and got murdered for it.”
“Then why are you here?” Lysanor hissed.
“Because I don’t care about Galahad. I care about saving both our worlds.”
“Don’t insult me with fake heroics and hollow talk of saving worlds. Why are you here really?”
“I want to save my grandma,” I admitted.
Lysanor scanned us one by one, her nostrils flaring. “And if I show you Lady Lyria’s journal, you’ll leave?”
“Yes,” Orla said. “And we’ll lead the army away. Willow’s Grave will be okay.”
Lysanor shook her head and put a hand to her temple in defeat.
“You have thirty minutes. This way.”
Her robes whirled as she spun on her heel to lead us back towards the staircase she’s appeared from. Orla was the first to follow, batting away one of Lysanor’s orbiting balls of light as she did.
“I don’t like this,” Ciarán hissed in my head.
“Me neither,” I admitted. “But it’s not like we have any other choice.”
“Hurry, Blue.”
The stairs spiraled down beneath the marble floor, and Lysanor’s glowing orbs of Skal flame floated on the air to light the way. Bookshelves rose overhead as we descended, brimming with thick-spined tomes.
“There is no collection in all of Skalterra that boasts a record of history as complete as mine.” Lady Lysanor explained. “I’ve worked tirelessly for half a century gathering it.”
“It’s beautiful,” Orla offered. “Best library I’ve ever been in.”
“No need to condescend to me. I already know it’s impressive.”
Orla sighed, and Iseult grabbed her hand.
The alleys between bookshelves disappeared into shadow, so it was impossible to tell how far the collection extended. Lysanor diverted us into one of these alleys, and the glowing orbs that floated around her pushed the shadows away.
We turned, and then turned again, and left the towering bookshelves behind to enter a marble-lined corridor. A small stairway at the end of the hall led up to a landing that boasted a statue of an armored woman standing with her palms held outwards.
“Lady Lyria,” Iseult murmured, and stepped ahead to kneel at the statue’s feet.
Lysanor followed suit and clasped her hands in front of her, as if in prayer. Her hands glowed with the same silver light I’d seen both Iseult and Galahad wield. Stone grated against stone as the statue sank into the floor, twisting as it went.