Chapter 47
ISI
Kerralyn pushed the door inward on silent hinges, and the library exhaled its secrets into the night.
Lexie snorted, bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet. “I can’t wait to snoop around the library when no one’s here. Do you think there are ghosts?”
“I hope not,” Derren muttered.
The library breathed at us like a sleeping giant.
Cool, dry air scented with paper and ancient leather wrapped around me as I followed my friends inside, my boots sinking into a plush runner.
Towers of shelves rose up like the pillars of a cathedral, vanishing into a darkness pricked with soft gold light.
Floating fairy orbs hovered in the air, drifting lazily along the aisles, casting a warm glow that made the spines wink like jewels.
Books whispered secrets in languages older than kingdoms, and the air itself felt heavy with possibility.
Derren let out a low whistle. “And here I thought the ballroom was the most decadent room in this place at night.”
“This is better,” Kerralyn breathed. “Ballrooms are for show. Libraries are for secrets.”
In the center of the room, a spiral staircase wound upward to a balcony, where every bit of available space had been lined with full stacks of books. Ladders rested along the rails, and far above, the painted constellations winked.
Something moved at the edge of my vision. I turned in time to see a thick tome floating past an aisle, its pages fluttering in a breeze that didn’t touch my skin.
Derren froze mid-step. “You mentioned wards but… Tell me the books here aren’t alive.”
Kerralyn tilted her head, studying the drifting volume. “Not alive, exactly. As I said, the wards keep everything in order.”
“How?” Lexie asked.
One of the carved statues, a male in a robe and twice my height, stepped down from a pedestal near the central desk. His eyes glowed a faint blue, and when he spoke, his voice rumbled like stone grinding on stone. “Identify yourselves and your purpose.”
Pherin’s claws dug into my shoulder. The little minxpip’s weight was reassuring, though her feathers were puffed and twitching as if she’d like nothing more than to flee.
Kerralyn swallowed. “We’re here to conduct research.”
The statue’s head tilted with the slow inevitability of a glacier. “Authorization?”
Lexie took a step back, whispering. “Please tell me you have that.”
“I have the key,” Kerralyn said, holding it up.
The statue’s eyes brightened, glowing blue. “Leave now or be removed.”
Kerralyn’s eyes flew toward the base of the statue. “They always ignored me. I thought we could slip past them.”
“Too late for that now,” Derren said.
“We could come back again tomorrow,” Lexie said.
“We’ll never get to the good books if we do.” Kerralyn’s gaze remained trained on the statue. “The librarian won’t allow us near them.”
“Then figure something out fast,” I said.
“We need to distract it or take the wards down.”
Take down wards? Stripping wards went well beyond my magical abilities, assuming something like that was even possible. An ancient court like this would have indestructible wards.
“Distraction I can do,” Derren called out.
He darted toward the far end of the foyer, a blur of dark leather.
The statue’s eyes flared like twin moons, and a beam of blue-hot magic shot out, catching him mid-step.
Frost bloomed up his boots, locking him in place.
He shucked them before the ice sank in and returned to us, his stockings whispering across the floor.
Lexie nodded and sidled toward a shelf, murmuring words in a lilting cadence. I wasn’t sure what it was. Maybe one of the spells she’d recently learned. The statue’s head swiveled slowly until it faced her, the blue glow intensifying. She stopped dead, her hands raised.
I wasn’t going to stand here while my friends were frozen in place. Reaching for my magic, I pushed outward, trying to shove the statue back with the same force I’d used on smaller obstacles. The statue barely quivered.
I clenched my teeth. The thing was anchored like it had grown from the floor.
Pherin fluttered from my shoulder. Something pressed into my mind, layer upon layer, and I got the feeling she wanted me to see past the stone itself.
“What?” I asked, still pushing uselessly.
“Triple-bound protections don’t hold without a keystone,” Kerralyn said, her brow furrowed.
Derren grinned. “I bet we can break this with our magic. What else?”
“The anchor point must be physical,” she chanted, her mind focused inward.
“Old Ryndhal’s treatise on siege magic said they favored stone carved with…
No, that’s when they feared counter-chanting—” She shook her head, her words tumbling faster.
“Salt lines burn magic thin, but only if the caster’s blood is mortal.
White ash could fracture containment circles in the old northern style.
And there was that account in The Breach of Lormere—ah!
—binding spells woven through sound can be unpicked if—”
She cut herself off, her eyes snapping to the base of the statue as if she could see something the rest of us couldn’t.
Pherin fluffed her small feathers, and the impression she sent me sharpened. Threads. Tangled, humming, alive.
I shouted it out. “Threads. Tangled. Humming. Alive.”
Kerralyn’s head whipped toward me, her eyes suddenly bright. “Threads? You can see them?” Her voice dropped. “Most people can’t, not unless the wards want to be seen. Look harder, Isi. Follow the hum.”
Now that she’d said it, the subtle sound pricked my ears.
Actually, it pricked across my skin like a swarm of bees brushing wings over my arms. I narrowed my gaze on the faint wisp of something above the statue’s platform, willing my vision to slip past it, to snag on something. “I do. I see…something.”
The statue scraped one granite foot across the stone floor, the sound rasping through the room.
“You have no sanction here,” he intoned, his voice deeper, darker, as if grinding up from the earth itself. His shadow stretched over us, the sword in his hand catching a glint of the fairy orbs overhead.
“Hurry, Isi,” Kerralyn hissed, her gaze flicking from me to the guardian. “Before he decides we’re trespassers and prey. Tell me if the threads are knotted or running clean. That will tell me how to cut them.”
Pherin sent a second wash of intent through me that wasn’t quite words but carried the feeling of push back, not forward.
Do you have something for this? I asked her silently.
She fluffed again. An impression bloomed in my mind, strands tangled like cobwebs but humming with power. A knot sat in the center, and I suspected it might be the binding holding the guardian to the wards.
“Center,” I called out.
We raced to the right side of the room with the statue stomping not far behind, his stony arms extended.
“Excellent,” Kerralyn said. “If you can loosen the knot, the rest might unravel.”
“Might?” Derren cried out, a touch of panic in his voice. “That’s all we’ve got, that something might work?”
“Do you have any other suggestions?” Kerralyn’s voice lifted a touch too high.
“Run?” he quipped. “Because I’m all out of boots to step out of.”
I’d never attempted anything like this. My magic was mostly directed outward. Shields, strikes, and moving small objects. This felt too delicate for a new magic-wielder like me.
Beams shot from the statue’s eyes, searing ice across the floor, aiming for us.
“Fuck,” Lexie hissed, and we raced across the big open room and took the staircase to the upper level.
The statue cocked his head back and shot more freeze our way, but we ducked, and it hit the wall behind us.
“Any time now,” Kerralyn said from beside me. “Reach out to the knot and loosen it.”
I stretched my mind inside, drawing on the hum of power that had always threaded through my blood. In my mind’s eye, I followed Pherin’s impression, slipping magic between the tangled strands until I came to the knot.
The statue started climbing the stairs, each thud of his stone boots resounding on the treads.
The knot felt tighter than I’d expected, and the moment I touched it, the wards shivered a warning.
Just a little more, I told myself. Instead of yanking, I coaxed, feeding bits of power into the thread, aiming for the bundle in the middle.
A strand loosened.
Another. The knot fell apart like damp twine, and the air in the library shifted.
The statue’s eyes dimmed to darkness. He froze partway up the stairs before he pivoted and shuffled back to his pedestal, resuming his original pose as if he’d never moved at all.
Derren let out a long breath. “That was impressive. Also terrifying. But mostly impressive. Great job, Isi.”
“My little minxpip, who everyone discounts, figured this out. She told me what to do.”
She released a self-satisfied trill.
They all studied her fluffy form.
“When cornered, a minxpip will bite,” Lexie said softly, repeating what she’d told me not long after I arrived. “Even the smallest flame can set the world on fire.” Her lips quirked up. “Or, in this case, unravel magic.”
We returned to the first level, though we remained far from the statue in case he woke once more.
“Where are the books about the Skathes?” I asked Kerralyn.
“In the back.” She hurried across the big open room and darted down a hall that led to an even larger room full of rows and rows of books. Cutting down the middle aisle, she kept going until she reached the end, stopping to peer into a glass case mounted to the back wall.
“They’re gone,” she sighed. “All that and they’re gone!”
A pristine cloth lay across the inside of the case showing only subtle dents where a few books might’ve recently laid.
“Should we start searching the shelves then?” I asked. “We might find other books that could be useful.”
“We can try.” Kerralyn frowned, glancing around.