Chapter 2
In fairer climes, the ride to the Orphic Basilica—which rested in an isolated clearing far beyond the northwestern outskirts of Rasileus, the largest town in Northgard—would’ve taken no longer than twenty minutes.
However, the road was layered thick with snow, and even in a sled, it forced the driver to stop every so often and shovel it out of the way.
This happened a few times, eliciting grumbles of disapproving impatience from the Matron, but it allowed Roy a closer look of the vista he’d seen from Dawnseve Manor.
A breeze lashed across his cheek, sweeping toward him from the right, and it was there that he looked.
In the distance, through the building haze of the snow, he saw the bulky outline of a commune shelter, made of cobblestone and weather-worn pieces of wood, all covered with a sheet of brown canvas that served as the walls and ceiling.
Around the structure were snaking lines of citizens, as Roy had seen before.
He was close enough now to make out a group of people clustered together.
A family, perhaps? A Drove was trudging toward them with seeming purpose, all her features obscured by a strip of woolen cloth but for her downcast eyes, which Roy could just barely see.
The sled driver, who’d cleared the majority of the snow blocking the road, hopped up onto the sled.
It gave a sudden jolt, and the Drove whom Roy had been observing looked up, her gaze snapping to his with frightening alertness.
Her eyes looked foggy, though that was probably an effect of the snow, and vividly bloodshot.
Then she turned back to her business, disregarding Roy and his companions as though she’d never noticed them.
She raised a black baton, which Roy hadn’t seen before.
The family shrank back, their mouths drawn into horrified grimaces, though the Drove continued her advance.
One member of the family—a young boy—tried to run, but the baton whipped down in a blur and cracked open his skull.
The boy was dead before he, and a pink splatter of his brains, hit the snowy ground.
As the sled glided onward, Roy, terrified, said to the Matron out of the corner of his mouth, “Did you see that?”
“See what?” she said, then looked where he was pointing. “Oh—yes.”
“You stand for this?” Roy asked. “This is part of the alliance you’ve forged with the Governor?”
“I do,” the Matron said, her gaze set forward. “It is. He was in dire need of some additional soldiers, so I contributed, and I . . .” She shook her head.
“What? What could you possibly be getting out of this?”
The Matron sniffed contemptuously, as though she’d smelt something foul. “Well, the aristocracy deserve some sort of safety for all their—our—labor.”
Roy went rigid with sheer disbelief. “You’re preserving the lives of the entire aristocracy at the expense of one aristocrat?” At the expense of your own son?
She did not reply.
A little while after, they passed around two dozen scholars skewered on the finials of a gate to an abandoned manor, like a row of scarecrows.
A book covered each of their faces, some at angles that concealed their features and others positioned so that their grim rictuses or dim, glazed eyes were visible.
Driven into the spines of these books were massive iron nails, each one encircled by a pool of frozen blood.
They’ve been bookmarked, Roy thought. He’d heard of the penalty and its apt, cruel name before but had never seen it with his own eyes. The macabre sight calcified his distanced dread into irrepressible horror.
As the sled moved on, Roy inspected the impaled corpses, searching for a familiar face among those whose features were partially revealed, but immediately realized there was no point.
He hadn’t met another scholar before, so none of these corpses stood out to him.
He still watched them, though, until they gained the ethereal aspect of phantoms and then disappeared entirely.
A shiver had coursed through Roy during the entire journey and now made his muscles tremble and lock together.
He huddled deeper into his coat, his teeth chattering, his hands wedged into his armpits.
He didn’t particularly mind the cold; this was his ideal element for a late-night bout of reading, a warm glass of cider in his hands, his feet propped up on a stool before the fireplace.
As soon as the thought formed, though, a seed of guilt sprouted in his stomach. Had he taken these forbidden literary pleasures for granted? Or was it because these pleasures were forbidden that he hadn’t deserved them in the first place?
“You ought to be more grateful for his assistance,” Dimestra said to Roy, breaking the silence. “He’s given you garments, he’s giving you food—”
Roy gave up fussing with his coat and pressed his hands into his lap. “I’d argue it’s my assistance that takes precedence here. Aren’t I the one helping him?”
Distaste passed over Dimestra’s features.
“I understand that there has been little reason for you to visit the city, so I’ll forgive your confusion, although I will not forgive your complacency.
You should consider yourself lucky you weren’t spirited off to the Iron Citadel, Roy.
At least now, you’re getting what you wanted. ”
That was the problem, though. Roy wasn’t sure this was what he wanted.
He had been satisfied, maybe even content, learning the lost and fragmented history of the old world—the Age of Scribes—from the works of the authors, poets, and playwrights who had come from that time .
. . but exploiting these invaluable resources for a man who would gladly exile or kill Roy’s fellow academics felt like betrayal.
He didn’t know if it was worth it. Even if this did win Northgard the war, he recoiled at the prospect of living with the shame of divorcing himself from his peers, for he had no doubt that his place as a scholar would be finished no matter the results he produced.
Roy narrowed his eyes at Dimestra. “I’m a member of the aristocracy, a son of the matriarch of a noble house.
I should be carrying on your legacy, not doing housework for your superior.
” He was contradicting himself, he knew—desperate to uphold Dimestra’s values, to belong somewhere, anywhere, despite his antipathy toward what she stood for.
Maybe once, before he had discovered the strength of the written word, Roy had been as much a part of Dawnseve Manor as its other tenants, but those days were long behind him.
Now he had no clue what he wanted, nor how he might go about obtaining something of value for himself. He was adrift, untethered.
“You’re indifferent,” Dimestra snapped, a trace of anger cracking through her glacial expression.
“That is your true weakness, Roy. You want to live in a cocoon, safe and protected by those who provide that safety. And now that you’re being given the chance to prove your worth, there stands yet another issue: I don’t believe you have any. ”
“You don’t understand.”
“Nor do I care to,” Dimestra retorted. “You read the letter. You know the facts. And since that doesn’t seem to be enough to enlighten you, let me do the honors: Our soldiers are dying by the dozens, and in some quadrants of the city, the hundreds.
The Edict of Containment was our sole source of hope, and the Old Ones shattered part of that iron wall like it was paper.
Five units of their soldiers, hammering through Northgard from the southern coast. All of this, and yet somehow you refuse to put down those damn books.
” She sneered, her cheeks reddening. For a second, just a fleeting moment, Roy was convinced she would strike him or punch him, bloody his nose.
She watched him for a long while, then asked, “Do you know what your apathy could do to the Governor’s reputation? ”
An ugly kind of resentment swelled within Roy.
But even though he did not sympathize with her concern, he at least understood it.
If he failed this assignment, it would not look good on the Governor’s end.
He would not take well to knowing that he had placed all his bets on a dithering, disobedient scholar—the son of his most loyal war commander and, if the rumors were true, his strongest political ally—just for Northgard to be defeated by the Old Ones.
There was no doubt that the Governor would somehow find a way to pin the blame for his own faults on Roy.
None of this had stopped Roy from consuming old-world literature.
He only had a small, secret collection of texts, which he’d salvaged from the rubble of a destroyed bookshop near Dawnseve Manor.
On multiple occasions, Briar had tried to cover for Roy, but on the morning after one of these escapades, Gabriel had beaten him over the head with a book he’d pilfered on the grounds that he was “succumbing to temptation.” Whether Briar had received some similar form of punishment for her role, Roy did not know.
If anything, that was his weakness—his inability to see beyond his own narrow desires. So maybe Dimestra was right . . .
“What could I possibly offer to the cause?” he asked Dimestra now. “Why does he need me when any other scholar—or, Hell, even one of his soldiers—could do?”
“Because, unless I’m mistaken, there aren’t any other scholars who were stupid enough to get caught!
” Dimestra snapped, startling Roy. She looked out the window; something had caught her attention.
Roy was about to follow where her gaze had strayed when she gave him an accusing glare and said, “The Governor will tell you the details of your assignment once we arrive, but I assure you, Roy, he does not trust you or your . . .” But she didn’t finish the sentence.
Your kind. That was what she’d been about to say. Because though Roy was a scholar as much as any of the others hiding in secrecy were, he was still an aristocrat. Perhaps that didn’t mean the Governor could place his trust in him, but he at least knew that Roy would get the job done.
Dimestra continued, “We’re cornered, Roy. We have no means, no external assistance, with which to inform the rest of the Hasdan Isles of our plight. This is our only option.”
Roy shook his head, exasperated. “The Basilica has no place in our predicament. Perhaps the library could function as a sanctuary, an infirmary for wounded soldiers.”
Derision slashed across Dimestra’s face. “I assure you, the Droves would rather die in the Basilica than be healed in it. No, the Governor has more useful intentions for the library.”
“I’m sure he does,” Roy muttered, his vitriol for the Governor—a man whom he had never met; a man who, up until now, had been mistreating and puppeteering scholars’ lives (if not outright destroying them) from the shadows—only intensifying.
The feeling struck deep enough that he felt compelled to ask, “Where has he been this whole time? Sequestered in his manor? Why has he suddenly decided now is the time to come out of the woodwork? I’ve never met this man before, never even seen his face, and yet he’s taken it upon himself to dictate—”
“The Governor has been . . . absent since his wife passed some few years ago,” Dimestra interjected with curt impatience.
Roy was more taken aback by the swiftness of her response than by the fact that she’d given him an answer.
“Her death has taken a mercilessly heavy toll on his health.” Her lips twitched, though apart from that, her expression was as implacable as before.
“Like I said, Roy, be thankful. His wisdom is plentiful.”
Roy rolled his eyes, then stilled. The sled had come to a jostling halt. He stumbled to his feet, a little unsteady from the ride, and then followed the Matron and the emissary out of the sled.
The banshee shriek of wind filled the space around him, and as it passed by, its echoes sounded to Roy like the dwindling cries of a spirit.
Unnerved, he trudged forward, his boots sinking deep into snow.
A vicious chill, much colder than anything he’d ever experienced throughout this endless winter, accosted him, creeping inch by inch across his skin and into his bones.
Then he noticed the pointed shadow only a hundred paces away from him, rearing up over his head like some incorporeal black blade, and the cold, the world, and all his mounting fears felt inconsequential in comparison.
He’d been so distracted by arguing with the Matron he hadn’t even taken stock of his surroundings.
Roy had made it to the Orphic Basilica.