Chapter 8
Olivia
The pack's training ground is the prettiest place I've ever been punched.
It's a clearing in a grove of white oaks, ringed with granite boulders somebody arranged on purpose a long time ago.
Morning sun comes through the canopy in gold coins, dew still silvers the grass at the edges, and a woodpecker is drumming away uphill, completely unbothered by the violence below.
If you have to get knocked on your butt three times before nine a.m., this is the scenery to do it in.
"You're not focusing today," Bram growls at me. "And did you actually just yawn?"
My face flushes hot. "Insomnia," I say loftily. "I barely slept last night."
That last part is true. What I'm not mentioning is that the reason I didn't sleep had nothing to do with insomnia.
This morning I scampered from Kieran's bed and fled the cabin, yelling behind me "This was a one-off!"
His quiet laughter infuriated me, but I didn't have time to stomp back and chew him out because I had to meet Bram and Rose for our morning torture session.
"Hmm," Bram says skeptically, and I quickly turn my back on him because I can feel my face heating up. Can he tell? Do I have a guilty look on my face? I showered; I shouldn't smell like sex anymore.
"Oh, lay off her," Rose calls out, and then does a quick sweep with her leg, kicking him in the back of the knee, and actually making him stagger.
"Wooo!" I shriek in approval, and we high-five and dance in joy.
Bram watches our victory dance with a pained expression.
"Better," he finally says to Rose. "You stopped announcing it with your shoulders first." He turns to me. "You, on the other hand, are fighting today with the reflexes of a boiled potato. Again."
We square up again. I'm mid-stance, concentrating ferociously on not being a potato, when Rose's whole face lights up at a point over my shoulder.
"Ooooh," she says. "A new victim to practice on!"
I turn around. Stephen is strolling up the path with his gym bag over his shoulder, and every muscle I own snaps to attention. All those years of stepping between my brother and the world will do that to a person.
Rose is already advancing on him, cracking her knuckles, and I resist the urge to leap in between her and him.
I force myself to smile instead.
"You," Rose informs my brother, "are going to stand there while I practice my sweep."
"Okay," Stephen says cheerfully.
He drops his bag and stands there and lets a seventeen-year-old take his legs out from under him, and he hits the dirt laughing, and gets up, and says, "Your heel's turning out at the end. Do it again."
She does it again. He goes down again. This is apparently the most fun either of them has ever had.
I watch my brother — the boy who's been braced for a hit since he was fourteen — voluntarily getting knocked down in a sunny clearing and coaching his attacker on her form, and I have to turn away and become very interested in a woodpecker for a minute. Otherwise I’d grab Rose by the hair and drag her away, screaming “Stop picking on my brother!”
Which would pretty much ensure he’d never speak to me again.
"Hey, I can only stay till eleven," Stephen calls to Bram. "I've got my thing with Amaryllis."
"Your thing," I say.
"Checkup." He shrugs, batting Rose's next sweep aside. "She likes to poke at me. Listen to my heart, look at my eyes. It's very boring."
"She's seen him every day this week," Rose says, hopping on one foot to stretch. "She's thorough. It's her whole personality."
So the pack's strongest healer has a new favorite science project, and my brother gets a daily once-over from the best there is, and that's more medical attention than the two of us could afford in the last decade combined. I decide to be grateful and not think any harder about it.
Bram releases us at ten with instructions to ice things, and I have a whole free morning and a plan for it. I've been saving the pack library the way you save the last chocolate mousse.
It's on the second floor of the meeting building, at the end of a hallway, and when I open the door, the smell hits me first — old paper, leather, hide glue. I inhale deeply, drawing the scent into my nostrils and savoring it.
The room is long and low, with real wooden shelves and a big table under the window, and it is full of treasure.
Hand-bound lorebooks with raised cords on their spines.
A herbal the size of a coffee table, its pages illuminated by hand, somebody's careful inks still bright.
Ledgers of pack history in copperplate. I walk the shelves with my hands behind my back for one full minute, being respectful.
Then I start touching everything.
I can't not. My fingers are doing inventory before my brain signs off on it.
This one's got red rot eating the leather, leaving powdering rust on my fingertips.
This one's front hinge is cracked through, the board hanging on by two cords.
This herbal — oh, this beautiful herbal has water damage in the top corner, and the pages are cockling, and somebody should have interleaved it years ago.
And then I see it, and I make a sound I usually reserve for crime scenes.
Somebody has repaired a two-hundred-year-old lorebook with packing tape.
Packing tape. On leather. The adhesive has gone amber and bled into the spine, and whoever did this is lucky I don't know their name, because there is no statute of limitations in my heart.
"You're petting the books."
I jump about a foot. Peyton is standing in the doorway with an armload of notebooks, watching me with an amused smile.
"I'm assessing the books," I say with dignity, which would land better if my hand weren't literally resting on the herbal the way you'd rest it on a sick friend's arm.
"Nobody comes in here but healers." She sets her notebooks on the table. "All our old remedy books live in this room. Half of them we're afraid to open anymore — the pages come away in your hand."
"They don't have to." It's out of my mouth before I've decided to say it, and then I'm at the shelf pulling the cracked-hinge ledger.
"This one would take an afternoon. It needs a new hinge, toned to match, you'd never see the repair.
The red rot needs consolidating before it spreads to its neighbors.
The herbal needs washing and resewing, that's real work, that's weeks.
And the tape—" I have to breathe through the tape part.
"The tape can be removed. Slowly. By someone who isn't an animal. "
Peyton is looking at me with interest now.
"I'm a bookbinder," I admit. "I mean, as a hobby. Well, I was." She cocks her head. "I had a full bindery back in Mississippi. I sold the tools before I came here.”
“Why?” She gives me a puzzled look. “It’s clear that you loved your work.”
I make myself put the ledger back on the shelf, square to the edge.
“It just seemed like the thing to do at the time.” I shrug. My financial situation is embarrassing and not up for discussion.
"Huh," Peyton says.
“Anyway, I should go. I need coffee, and then I want to go check on my brother.” I give the books one last regretful look before I leave.