Chapter 22 #2
“Not so far. I had a chance to exchange a quick word with Benedikt at the start of the ball—he said he’s gotten confirmation that it wasn’t the first time Torstem has brought a kid around to see the college.
Apparently it’s a fairly common habit of his.
But the people he talked to were under the impression they were relatives from his own family or those of associates. ”
I’ve spotted the family tree part of the chart. “He doesn’t have much in the way of his own relatives, it looks like.”
“He doesn’t,” Alek agrees. “One grown daughter who’s taken a wife and adopted a toddler. One sister and a couple of cousins, only a few children between them, either years past dedication age or many years off. No one who’d match the boy you described.”
“And no one in his family would have acted like an outer-warder anyway.” I frown.
Alek glances toward the door to the larger archives.
“I wanted to get access to his financial records. Those could tell quite a story. The college has its own banking system for staff, and all money goes in and out through the accounting office. But the accountants keep the ledgers in a secure room off the library. It’s not the sort of thing they’d hand over or I can simply walk in and take. ”
My spirits lift with a flash of renewed confidence. Now this sounds like exactly the kind of job I’m meant to do.
“Show me where the room is, and we’ll figure something out.”
Alek shoots me a skeptical look. “They’re not going to let you just walk in either.”
“I wasn’t planning on asking.” I waggle my fingers. “Thief, remember?”
He pauses, a whole debate going on in the shadow that passes over his eyes.
Julita lets out a bright chuckle. Oh, this is going to be fun.
“Julita approves of the plan,” I add, because I can.
Alek’s gaze jerks to mine again. His lips purse.
Then his flicker of a smile comes back. “Fine. Let’s see what you can make of it, at least.”
He leads me through the larger archive room and then two more basement areas that are stuffed full of all the documents and books the archivists don’t think anyone really needs but can’t bear to get rid of anyway. We slip up a winding staircase and into the library proper.
I’ve never actually been in this vast room before. The smell of aged leather and paper comes with less dust than the lower archives, and the endless rows of bookcases are spaced farther apart for ease of access, with narrow rugs stretching in between. Every shelf is packed with worn leather covers.
I drink in the scent and suppress the longing to wander from row to row, scanning every title. We’re on a mission here.
Alek leads me on a roundabout route, avoiding the clusters of chairs around small tables where students are murmuring to each other over open texts.
In a far corner of the room, he nods toward a door with a glass pane etched with Estera’s sigil and a bronze plaque proclaiming it the Accounting Archive.
“Who can open that door?” I ask him quietly.
“Only a couple of the librarians are on the accounting staff and have access. Usually, one works in the morning and the other in the afternoon.” He cranes his neck to peek through the window from afar. “Stera. Elzbita is in there right now.”
“And they just sit around all day waiting for someone to need to make a transaction?”
Alek shakes his head. “They’re still librarians and archivists too. They come out and advise the students when they aren’t otherwise occupied.”
I take in the shelves around us, the small table off to the side that no one has ventured far enough to sit at, the hardwood floor partly covered by more rugs. A plan takes shape in my head.
“If you can come up with an excuse to request her help, something you’d specifically need her for over the other librarians, I can get that ledger. You’ll just need to keep her busy for long enough for me to find the right one.”
Alek inhales a little shakily, but when I look at him, a spark has come into his bright brown eyes. He rocks on his feet as if gathering momentum. “I can do that. Yes.”
He aims a quick smile at me, brighter than the one before. Great God help me if my heart doesn’t flip right over at the conspiratorial gleam in the flash of his teeth. Then he strides forward without waiting for further instructions.
I dash to the table, nudge one of the chairs aside, and duck down where I’ll be out of sight. I’ve got a clear view to the accounting office, about ten paces away.
As Alek knocks on the door, I slide a knife out of its sheath on my leg. My fingers curl around it, the muscles in my arm already flexing as I judge the distance.
The librarian opens the door, and Alek gives her a spiel I can’t totally follow about source documents and financial interconnections.
Whatever he’s getting at, Stera. Elzbita appears to catch on. She nods a few times and then, huzzah, pushes the door wide to step past it and usher him to a set of shelves elsewhere in the library.
I watch the swing of the door back toward its frame and listen to the padding of their footsteps retreating. At the last possible second, I flick my hand forward.
The knife flies through the air and hits the space between the door and the frame just before the door thuds into place. The two slabs of wood pin the blade between them, leaving the door just a smidge ajar.
Julita lets out a whoop of approval in my head.
I allow myself a victory grin and glance around this corner of the library again. Alek and Stera. Elzbita have disappeared from view; no one else is around.
I stay low anyway, darting across the short span of floor and reclaiming my knife as I scoot through the doorway. I close the door behind me in case anyone passes by who’d be concerned.
The accounting room smells like tallow, though I can’t see any candles currently in use. A modest glow streams from a thin window over the built-in bookcases.
I scuttle past the desk, keeping my head below the level of the window on the door, and paw through the rows of leatherbound ledgers on the shelves. Irritatingly, they have only numbers that are meaningless to me printed on their spines, with no apparent order.
After peeking inside a few, I realize the pattern at the same time Julita apparently does. They’re alphabetical by name. Ster. Torstem’s should be toward the end, then.
It only takes a few more tries to land on the one with his name on the first page. I don’t bother flipping through the pages with their cramped notations yet, just hug the ledger close to my chest and slink back over to the door.
It should be simple enough to slip back out and—
Voices filter through from outside. I freeze with a lurch of panic at the thought that the librarian might have returned already.
But it’s two male voices, joking about how far up their professor’s ass they’d like to stick the scroll they were just poring over.
I hold still and silent, willing them to move on. For some reason, they’ve decided to hang around right by the accounting office.
Obnoxious asses, Julita mutters. Why don’t they get moving?
My mouth starts to go dry. Just how long can Alek keep Stera. Elzbita occupied with his made-up question?
As if on cue, my magic twitches in my chest. Jumping to remind me that it could move these obstacles ever so easily if I’d just let it.
I inhale slowly and will it to calm down. Will myself to believe I have everything under control and there’s no reason my power should be upset at me for not giving in.
My riven soul isn’t totally convinced. A needle-sharp prickling resonates through my ribs. I brace my hand against the doorframe.
It should be a relief when the two blathermouths outside finally budge. Their voices slowly but surely fade away as they amble off.
Now I just have to pull off a stealthy maneuver while my insides are gnawing on themselves. Lucky me.
With my jaw clenched, I ease up to peek through the window. The moment the two men have veered around the nearest bookcase, I gird myself and run for it.
With a quick push to ensure the door closes behind me, I sprint across the rug. A deeper jolt of pain puts a hitch in my stride, but I let myself drop with it so I can skid beneath the table.
As my shoulder bumps one of the wooden legs, Alek’s voice reaches my ears, raised a little louder than I’d typically expect. To make sure I hear them coming?
“Thank you so much for your help, Stera. Elzbita. I’m sure I’m on the right path now.”
While I watch from my hiding spot, the librarian pats him on the arm and heads back into her office. I stay braced for a few seconds in case she’s going to burst back out announcing the theft, the pain dwindling with each moment she doesn’t.
Alek ambles away with an uncertain expression. When I’m sure there’ll be no immediate retaliation, I duck out and follow him.
Through unspoken agreement, I hang back several paces behind him all the way to the stairs to the archives room. I hit the bottom of the staircase and find Alek waiting there, his eyes gleaming even brighter than before.
His gaze drops to the book clutched in my arms. “You got it?”
I grin at him. “This is the one.”
When I hold it out to him, he takes it and examines the first few pages. A smile stretches across his lips. “You really pulled it off. I don’t know how you did it.”
I shrug. “We all have our own talents. I couldn’t have talked the librarian into walking away with me.”
He swings the ledger under his arm and meets my gaze to encompass me in his delight. “Not bad for our first real mission together, huh?”
I can’t help smiling back. Who’d have thought it’d be Alek out of all of the guys who’d help me pull off a crime—and revel in the thrill of it?
As we head back to the meeting room, he walks with an extra spring in his step. “Is that the sort of thing you needed to do a lot of, surviving on the streets? Sneaking into places, making quick escapes?”
I think of my “home” in the cloth factory.
“Yeah, that was a pretty big part of it. Especially as I got older. When you’re a kid, you can get away with a little more.
” Sleeping on a doorstep. Plucking a few spare pieces of fruit off someone’s tree.
“Thankfully, the older I got, the more practice I had at staying unnoticed.”
Alek halts, his gaze gone serious again. “When you’re a kid—how old were you when you left home?”
My stomach knots. I probably should have omitted that bit.
“Twelve,” I say quickly. “Not that young.”
But young enough for Alek’s eyes to widen. “And your parents just let you—I mean, I know they were harsh with you, but—”
“They didn’t let me. I went, and there wasn’t much they could do about it.”
My tone is probably too sharp. It isn’t him I’m upset with—and he isn’t even wrong.
I doubt they ever looked for me. I doubt they felt anything but relief that I was no longer their problem.
Alek doesn’t appear to take any offense to my retort. He hesitates and then offers me another smile, smaller but somehow more giddying than the excited one before. “I suppose it worked out for the best in the end. If it wasn’t for that, you wouldn’t be here with us.”
He doesn’t really mean me. He means the woman I’m carrying with me. I know that.
But my hand still reaches for his of its own accord, as if some part of me needs the physical contact to confirm our solidarity. Or maybe I’m trying to make it totally clear to him how much I am in this crazy situation with him.
Foolish of me. I’ve barely brushed his fingers before Alek is yanking them away.
The connection I thought I felt snaps.
The scholar opens his mouth, closes it again, and then tips his head toward the room where we usually meet. “We’d better look through this quickly. We don’t want it missing for too long before we return it.”
“Of course not,” I say, pretending his rebuff never happened, and shove my jumbled feelings down.
I need to keep those ridiculous impulses reined in. We’re working together only for now, and soon enough we won’t be.
And I’ll go back to doing everything on my own.
No one else to worry about. No one else calling the shots.
The thought shouldn’t create a hollow sensation in the pit of my stomach.
We tramp back to the small, dusty room, and Alek tosses himself into the chair behind the desk. I perch on the desk’s edge while he pages through the ledger, starting at the most recent entries and skimming back through the pages with impressive speed.
“There are regular expenses marked as donations, the same amount once a month, going back years,” he reports after a moment. “To ‘RI’ it says, and nothing else.”
“Someone’s initials?” I suggest.
“Perhaps. I’ll see if a full name comes up.”
He’s got less than ten pages left when he pauses. “Now that’s quite the sum. A large endowment to some place called the Riverside Institute for Children’s Wellness, fifteen years ago.”
RI, Julita murmurs at the same time as my heart leaps.
“Children,” I repeat.
“I’ve never heard of that organization before.” Alek peers at the page and then flips back through a few more. “But it looks like the monthly donations started right after that initial endowment.”
He glances up at me, a glimmer of his earlier exhilaration coming back into his eyes. “I think we’ve got it.”
Before I can respond, the far wall wavers, and Benedikt steps out of the hidden passage.
He raises his eyebrows at the two of us. “Hard at work already? The others should be along in a moment. What are you two looking so smug about?”
I hop off the desk, my good mood returning. “We’re uncovering all of Ster. Torstem’s secrets. Now we’ve just got to check out this place and find out what he’s really up to.”