Chapter Nine #2
He meets my gaze for a moment, assessing. “Fine.” He turns to the door. “Let’s go before a servant catches us in here.”
Roze stops abruptly before a tall pair of doors, and I crash into him. He lets out an oof and steadies me with his hand. “Head out of the clouds, Sinclair; you nearly bludgeoned me with your hair.”
I glare at him.
A smile blooms on his lips. “Wipe the scowl off your face, darling. I’m making good on my promise.”
“What promise?”
“My surprise.”
His hand leaves my shoulder, and he backs into the doors, smiling wickedly the whole time as he opens them. I step into the room, and for a moment, I can only stand there, my heartbeat audible in my ears.
And then … I’m wonderstruck.
When Roze said he had access to books that others didn’t, I imagined that he meant a small collection in a family study, but the room I’m standing in could hold a dozen of the stone-hewn hovels I grew up in, and every inch of it is filled, wall to glorious wall, with books.
It’s markedly different from the gloomy and ostentatious Vandenberghe library, with its Gothic architecture and dizzying ceilings.
The Roquelart private library feels like the morning of the Winter Solstice—crimson carpets, flickering candles, and gilded molding along the bookshelves.
Several jewel-toned velvet chairs are arranged around the room with paintings set on display easels around them.
Tables full of trinkets—porcelain, silver, and rubies.
Expensive things. Ancient things. Items so precious the royals hoard them all to themselves like regal dragons.
Actual wood waits in the fireplace, waiting to be lit, should anyone request it. The excess of it all is mind-boggling.
And then there are the books. Glorious books.
I rush to the shelves and run my hand over the volumes, scanning the titles as Roze stands by the door, watching me.
He wasn’t joking—these titles would never be allowed in Vandenberghe or anywhere else in the Kingdom.
Any other time, I would bristle at the hypocrisy, but right now, I’m far too curious.
I pull a volume off a shelf at random and flip it open, only to be assaulted with gruesome illustrations of torture techniques.
“Ugh!” I exclaim, and Roze chuckles.
“Welcome to the hall of banished books,” he says.
“Is that really what this is called?”
“It’s what I call it,” he says, eyes glinting with mirth. He saunters toward me, hands in his pockets. “This morning, we exhausted our options with the school library. I thought this might provide us with more adequate research materials.”
I eye the door suspiciously. “And no one will find us here?”
He inclines his head. “How much do you think my nitwit sisters read?”
We spend the rest of the afternoon in the Roquelart library, skipping classes.
Roze keeps stacking books next to where I’m spread out on the floor, volumes surrounding me like a moat.
I’ve been scribbling notes for hours, Waffles dozing at my side.
At some point Roze brought tea, but mine has gone cold, abandoned amid the towers of texts.
I can hardly believe the information I’ve found.
There are dozens of books on magic, on Castelle, on the war.
I linger far too long on several instructional texts for meigas, marveling that there was actually a time when we studied magic instead of hiding it.
But I struggle to understand them. It’s as though I’m missing some context, some elementary education in the fundamentals of magic that all these texts take as a given.
They refer to the “wholeness” of magic being its strength and encourage meigas to harness that wholeness, but they never explain what that means.
And though I’m looking for some instruction on controlling my magic, gaining strength and power seem to be all these meigas are interested in.
But I need to focus on the book Professor Borges gave me and its runes.
Unsurprisingly, I can’t find anything on them, even here in the Roquelarts’ secret library.
Professor Borges has spent ages trying to decode the Hivernian runes.
If there were a book easily translating ancient Aragoise to runes here, the Queen would have provided it.
There is a shocking amount of material, however, on the war.
Kole was right—there was an armistice, a brief one, in the last years of the war.
In fact, a peace treaty seemed to be all but signed, but Castelle betrayed Aragoa, using its meigas to send the Mists.
One text vividly describes the day the Mists came, and I can hardly bear to read it—the way they first appeared on the horizon like a bad storm and then began to roll into the valley of the capital city, first burning the forest, and then the farmland, before falling on the heart of the city itself.
There were only minutes—less than an hour, it says—for anyone who could to get inside the castle to rush to safety while Aragoa’s own meigas set up wards to protect those inside.
But there’s no mention of the meigas’ betrayal. I suppose the Queen doesn’t want that information even in her own library—a reminder of rebellion.
“Sinclair?”
Roze’s voice heaves me out of the depths of my thoughts. I’ve lost track of the hour, but the sunlight barely piercing the windows through the Mists has dimmed to a kohl gray.
I look up at Roze, and he’s strewn himself lopsided in an armchair so large it looks made for a giant, a weighty volume open on his lap. My heart does a funny flip at the way the dying light illuminates half his face, the way his eyes are glazed and half open from hours of research.
“I know you would stay in here until you rust, but I’m afraid if we don’t leave now, we’ll be late to dinner.”