Chapter 12
In the days following their breakthrough on the seventh floor, the most baffling thing happened to Roy.
Every time he saw Percival, Roy could think of nothing and nobody else.
Every time he knew Percival was nearby, he felt addled and weak, as though he’d drunk to the bottom of one too many glasses.
He thought about him far too often and, because of this, he studied far too little.
He lost his rhythm. He slipped up in his notations.
He forgot idioms and aphorisms that had once come easily to him.
I can’t let you get in my way.
He thought of that frequently, too, how can’t wasn’t won’t, how, to Roy, it sounded like Percival was stopping himself from the affliction that had come over Roy.
Was that not what this was? A sickness? He didn’t feel ill, at least not physically, but his imagination, reason, and perception were unquestionably impaired.
Once more he wondered if this sickness was in any way connected to what the Droves who had unsuccessfully investigated the library had experienced, if the library had anything to do with how recurrently Roy’s thoughts snagged on Percival, but the latter especially seemed highly unlikely.
Roy could be outside the library, shivering and frozen down to the marrow in his bones, and Percival would still be on his mind.
Roy attempted, for a while, to view this strange infatuation— a feeling he had not once encountered in his twenty-five years—in an analytical light.
He thought of how he’d felt whenever Percival looked at him, whenever he spared him a glance that held longer than was strictly necessary, but in his endeavor to define this host of emotions twisting and tumbling in him, Roy found himself remembering Percival’s crooked smile again, and the intricately detailed brown flecks in his hazel eyes, and the unexpected strength he’d displayed when he’d caught Roy the other night, borne up on that mysterious, whistling wind.
Then he was back to where he’d begun—falling for Percival, with no clue as to how to get back up.
The nights wore on, seeming to darken with time, and his feelings deepened, sitting restless in the pit of his stomach.
He didn’t know what to do with them, how to study or read or cope in such conditions.
How did one go on with an attraction so distracting?
And yes, he could finally admit that this was attraction.
Perhaps a ruinous sort of attraction, but a pull he felt nevertheless.
The question lingered, then: How did one distract oneself from a distraction?
The same way he had with the repulsion he’d felt for his brother: He read and worked on and examined texts into the smallest hours of the night, until reality became intangible, a gray pool of water he had to wade through.
He surrounded himself with books. He absorbed encyclopedias and pamphlets, poems and articles, anything distantly or closely related to the Old Ones and how they’d been temporarily banished from Northgard by the Elder Scribes.
He did not care if he came up empty. He only wanted these thoughts out and gone before they could do him further harm, before he dawdled for the next six months, lost in Percival’s eyes, enchanted by his smile.
Roy knew he was not alone in his thinking.
Something had formed between them, not an understanding but something undeniable nonetheless.
He could feel it, sense it—the stretches of taut silence, the stealthily stolen glances they exchanged while Roy wrote up his personal report of their progress for the Governor (found some mentions of black armor, will follow up later; researching historical battles to find references of tactics and patterns similar to Old Ones’), the resemblances between the books they leafed through and the notes they jotted down.
He liked it sometimes. It gave him a thrilling rush.
Whenever he caught Percival’s eye, he could not tell which of them had won a round.
But these pleasures were temporary, and they left Roy feeling a selfish, petty sort of spite.
Hadn’t Percival shown moments of weakness?
If so, then wasn’t there an event from his past that must have been responsible for the crease in Percival’s brow and the set of his shoulders?
These questions shifted Roy’s spite into concern.
If Roy could not change Percival, then perhaps he could understand him. Perhaps that was what Percival was doing in return, and Roy was too broken to see it.
It was foolish to let some wild-mannered man affect him so, Roy knew that. But by the Scribes, he’d never been so eager to do right, to prove his competition wrong so that he could stop thinking of him, of the small joys he couldn’t have.
* * *
About a month into the investigation, Roy was in the Observatory, in the middle of reading a thesis on the Warfare-Philosophy Principle, when three rapid knocks sounded from the first floor.
Once he finished the sentence he’d been reading, he stood from his seat, exited the Observatory, and then paused at the railing of the nearest balcony.
Down below, Percival handed several torn-out sheets of notebook paper to the Governor, who then looked over them with a stern nod before folding and tucking them into an inner pocket of his suit.
Behind him, three Droves were carrying crates packed full of supplies—inkwells, quills, notebooks, waterskins, loaves of bread, cheese, and several types of fruit—and bringing them up to the sixth floor, where the Governor had told Roy at the beginning of the assignment to select his personal chambers.
As the Droves passed Roy on the fifth floor, he noticed that they moved with mechanical exactness, their shoulders stiff and their bloodshot eyes ringed with shadows.
With an affirmative grunt, the Governor dismissed Percival, who silently turned on his heel and headed back to wherever he’d been studying without acknowledging Roy. Or maybe he didn’t see him.
The Governor did, though. He looked up at the balcony where Roy stood, holding his gaze, an expectant expression on his face.
Roy swallowed, then nodded and walked back into the Observatory to retrieve his own report, which he’d been working on over the last few days. It was not an extensive list by any means, for they were only a month into their investigation, though it was also evidence of their labor.
It was proof that they wouldn’t just take the Governor’s supplies without recorded progress of their research.
Still, when Roy got to the first floor and gave the Governor a sheaf of several papers, torn out of the notebook he’d been writing in, he could neither hold back nor explain the frisson of unease that went through him.
“If the weather wills it,” the Governor told Roy, one of the Droves opening the doors to the Basilica behind him, “I’ll be back in four weeks.” He tucked Roy’s sheaf of papers in the same pocket where he’d placed Percival’s. “Best of luck to you both.”
* * *
A little later that day, Roy went up to the sixth floor, where he had been tailed by the creature, in the hopes of finding an artifact from the Age of Scribes that might hold relevance to the Old Ones.
This floor, like those beneath it, was crowded with manuscripts, but it also featured the exhibition of relics Roy had looked through on his first night.
After seven hours of picking through the shelves and cabinets, he almost wanted the Old Ones to raid the library, if only so he could be reminded they existed and maintain his sanity.
“Do you plan to stumble and fall again?”
Roy looked up from the astrolabe he’d been observing, which he’d placed on the low-lying table in front of him.
Percival strode toward Roy, his boots rapping against the floorboards. He pointed at the bookshelf past Roy’s shoulder. “It happened over there. I would know; I remember it quite clearly.”
Roy remembered it, too, almost as well as he remembered what Percival had said some few days ago. There is a line between us, Roy, and crossing that line would not do well for either of us.
Roy had skirted that line by admitting that he’d heard whispers when he’d entered the Orphic Basilica, and although the game was over, discontinued shortly after it had begun, he couldn’t remember being accosted by the ghost without remembering the brief impression he had seen of Gabriel’s leering grin.
He wanted to tell Percival about the ghost, because he was sure it had its own place in this conspiracy somehow.
But each thought and memory of Gabriel drew a new line of blood over Roy’s scars, and he didn’t think he could go through with it if Percival saw and knew what evil had been done in that old, cold manor Roy had once called home.
Just tell him about the ghost, Roy told himself. Just the ghost. That’s all you have to do. Simple, no?
Not so, he thought, because he had only now fully come to terms with his attraction for Percival.
These feelings were fresh and therefore fragile, and he could not trust himself to tell Percival the necessities without letting slip something about Gabriel, something about the true thing haunting him.
So he said nothing.
Percival surveyed Roy from head to foot, then dropped his gaze to his book again. “You haven’t found anything, have you?” He sounded accusing, but also faintly sad.
Roy saw no reason to lie. “Nothing.”
Percival nodded, the palest shade of red forming on his cheeks.
“I’ve been looking for any more references to black chest plates in The Lost Records of Old Wynair and any reports on the Elder Scribes’ agenda with, and banishment of, the Old Ones.
But that’s about as much as I included in my report to the Governor.
Otherwise, all I managed to find were other books on Wynair, but—”
“What?” Roy exclaimed. “Where are they?”