Twenty-Five - Isabel
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I spent hoursporing over the aspekts of binding scroll, looking for hidden clues about the node. Even in the lush comfort of Felix’s spire room, the time had left me with a stiff neck and sore back. The scroll had answered the question of how Lady Cecily had used the node to cast her curse, but nothing more. The euphoria of having one question answered quickly faded when we realized it didn’t help us break the curse.
The next morning, I decided to search the archives. Without the need to hide from Marc, I could take my time and use my magical senses to locate more Truth scrolls. As I had told Felix, Valois seemed to be the type of person to cast dozens of variations of a single spell, testing all parameters. There might be other scrolls relating to the aspekts of binding. Or a scroll that explained why Felix could create his own Truths, but not reverse Lady Cecily”s, despite being the primary node-tie holder.
Finding a Truth scroll was easier said than done. I could sense the magic and know what I held without unrolling it, but I still essentially had to stumble across the scroll by accident first. Whatever system organized the scrolls was not chronological or based on signatories. I refused to believe there wasn’t a system in place, though. One that had made sense to Valois. One probably outlined in one of the Truth scrolls scattered throughout the archives, if I only knew how to find the one I needed.
Whatever the system was, odds were the library was organized the same way. Noticing a pattern would be easier there.
With a burst of optimism, I left the archives and made my way to the southeast tower. An hour spent just on the first level wilted my optimism. Every time I thought I identified a pattern, the next book or shelf broke it. As I had noticed on my first time through the library, the books were grouped by genre at first glance, but not fully.
I stepped back from the shelves, looking over them from the center of the room by the staircase and mulling over what I had seen. Histories, biographies, cookbooks, treatises, and the occasional novel. If I recalled correctly, I had found a similar range of books on the third floor during my initial inspection. A similar range but not the same balance between genres.
I made my way up the stairs, wanting to confirm. Looking over the first shelf, I knew my memory was accurate. Up here, novels filled the majority of the space, but there was still a history book tucked here and a biography there. I spotted a history of Gostet between a volume of poetry and a playscript and pulled it from the shelf. I had seen a similar book down on the first level.
Book in hand, I made my way back downstairs and hunted for the tome I remembered. Once I found it, I carried both books to the spire room. By that point, I would have preferred to collapse on the floor and compare them without climbing three flights of stairs, but I was afraid the castle would whisk the books back to their shelves before I finished.
I placed both books on the table next to the chaise and opened them. I didn’t know what I was looking for. The books had different authors and had been written nearly a century apart. I already knew those differences didn’t explain how they were sorted. I turned pages, skimming, wondering what I thought I’d find.
“Are you planning to eat?”
I yelped, Felix’s question catching me completely off-guard. My eyes were gritty, like I had forgotten to blink as I tried to take in every word in the books in front of me. I looked at them, seeing the books instead of the words. I had flipped through about a third of the pages in one book, half in the other. Nothing had triggered any recognition in me.
Felix hopped onto the table. “What has you so engrossed?”
He looked down, reading, and scoffed. “Did you find this drivel in my library? I doubt you could even read it aloud on castle grounds; it is so wrong.”
I blinked. Then blinked again. “What about the other book?”
Felix shifted and read from the volume that I had only made it a third of the way through. “This one looks fine.”
“That’s it,” I gasped. I hadn’t read carefully enough. The books were structured differently, so the discrepancies hadn’t jumped out at me. The few I had noticed I had attributed to the authors’ biases. But if one history was fundamentally false, and the other true . . .
Well, the node was locked to truth magic, wasn’t it? “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before.”
Felix tilted his head. “What’s it? Think of what?”
“I bet I can use the node to test it. Come on.”
I closed both books and carried them over to the trapdoor.
Felix leapt after me. “Are you going to explain anything?”
“When we get to the great hall.”
I paused on each level of the library, pulling a couple books from the shelves, careful to stack them based on where I had found them. Felix watched me in bemusement but refrained from asking for any more explanations.
I stopped when I stood next to the node. I didn’t expect my test to take long enough that the castle would shelve the books while I worked, but I also didn’t want to take the chance. Calling in the table from the spire room—an option that hadn’t occurred to me while in the library—I set down my pile of books.
Then I lifted the top book—the history of Gostet Felix had disparaged—and held it to the flames.
As I had hoped, the node read the truth of the text, treating the printed author as a signatory.
I listened to the bells and whistled. “He knew what he was writing was that wrong and still published it? This book is nothing more than propaganda.”
Felix swished his tail over the marble floor. “I already told you that. It still doesn’t explain your comments.”
“Patience.” I set the false history book down and lifted the next book.
Also from the third floor of the library, that book was declared a work of fiction, though with benign intent, when I held it to the node. I went down the stack one by one and confirmed my theory. The books from the second floor were all truer than those from the third. And the ones from the first floor were the truest of all. My demonstration wasn’t quite perfect, as the order of books from the same floor didn’t always match the increasing levels of trueness, but how they were organized within a level was an experiment for later.
By the time I finished, I could see that Felix had figured it out. He gaped at me. “That is the answer? All this time, the library has been organized by trueness?”
“I bet it is the same system in the archives.”
“You’re probably right, but I’m not sure how that helps us.”
“If you remember what color you saw when Lady Cecily cast the curse, we can find it in the archives. Knowing the exact phrasing might help us figure out how to reverse it.”
“It can’t hurt.” Felix looked up at me with wide eyes. “But can we eat first?”