Chapter Thirty-Seven #2
The costumes of the commoners make up for a lack of quality materials with extraordinary creativity.
A young boy sports a unicorn mask crafted from a spiraled seashell, which glitters in the lantern light as he darts through the crowd.
Nearby, a slim man dances in armor transformed into an impressive imitation of snakeskin.
Then a woman glides past, butterfly wings fashioned from a gauzy material stretched delicately across a frame made of picture wire trailing behind.
At the center of it all is Ronan. The people don’t recognize him; his golden lion mask covers most of his face, but I can feel him, even from a bit of distance now. This is why he loves masked balls, I realize. He doesn’t have to be the God-King here. Out in this courtyard, he’s just Ronan.
I dance my way into the crowd to join him. I don’t know the dance they’re doing, but it’s easy enough to pick up. And it’s far more fun than the courtly dances with their complicated patterns and rules that keep you at a distance from each other.
“I see we had the same idea,” he says as I finally make it to him.
“We did,” I say, touching his mask and then mine. Eagle and lion. The two halves of the griffin. “I’m the head, and you’re the ass.”
“And what a fine ass I am.” He laughs and kisses me right on the lips in front of everyone.
“What are you doing?”
“No one knows who we are! It’s the best night of the year. Come on, enjoy yourself. I insist.”
Ronan takes me by the arm and leads me into the crowd to join the dance. We dance for hours in a dizzying whirl of costumes and color, the heat of our bodies keeping away the growing cold, until finally, wordlessly, he leads me up the stairs and back into the ballroom.
“I have a surprise for you,” he says.
He leads me past some guards and out onto the small balcony where we kissed. Sitting there grazing on some kind of fish is the griffin.
“She stayed,” I say. I walk to her cautiously, but she recognizes me. She headbutts me, nearly taking off my mask. I pull the mask the rest of the way off, and Ronan does the same.
“I named her Kira. In honor of Kerensa.”
“I thought you weren’t a believer.”
“I have a soft spot for the goddess of beauty.”
“And love,” I say without thinking. Then my heart begins to race as I realize what I’ve said. “Are those straps?” I say, quickly changing the subject.
They’re anchored around her neck and waist. It looks like we’d fit on her back between her wings, which seems like a much more comfortable place to ride than her neck had been.
“I want to have a saddle made, but there hasn’t been time. The stablemaster did a couple of test flights with the straps. I’m not sure if he was more excited or terrified, but he said they work well to keep you strapped on. What do you say?”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“You’ll see.”
I climb up onto her back with Ronan’s help, sitting at the front. He takes a seat behind me and then tightens the straps around us both. Then he takes a thin strap connected to a collar around her neck. Reins.
“I’m thinking of going back after the festival to see if I can find more of them. Imagine it: griffins for everyone. We could cross the desert safely. You could return to Nithyria to visit when you wanted to. It would be wonderful.”
To return to Nithyria to visit. I hadn’t thought of that.
If I stay with Ronan, I’ll have to move here.
I won’t be going back home. Not that there are many people there I’d miss, to be honest. But would Larus stay with me here?
Or would he return with my siblings, assuming I can get Adria to go home and stay there?
I don’t have time to give it much thought before Kira flaps her great wings, and we’re off into the night sky over the ball.
The view is as spectacular as I remembered, more so without the fear of falling. The straps keep us firmly attached to her as she soars and dives, flying at Ronan’s direction up the River Mara.
Kira climbs sharply as we round a bend in the river, and I can finally see her target: the Ivory Spire, home of the Great Library of Faros.
“Is it open?” I ask.
Ronan laughs. “For us, it is.”
Kira lands on a very narrow balcony that circles the top of the tower.
The ledge is decorated with marble statues of the gods, each of them facing outwards to overlook the city.
Vayla, a torch in her hand; Vahlo, a sickle in his; Arnan with his trident; Kerensa with her bow and arrow; and Sai with his sword and shield.
Ronan helps me down and moves a waiting bucket to Kira: more fish.
“I know you wanted to see the Five Wonders, but this place is a wonder to me. My favorite place in the city.”
Here at night, we’re the only ones inside. Ronan leads me through an arched doorway into a small observation room. There are strange golden instruments on wooden stands near the windows, the kind they use to chart the stars. “Are we interrupting their work?”
“Not for long.” He leads me to a staircase that spirals down into the tower proper.
“Good gods,” I say as we step onto the landing. The floor we’re standing on spirals down at least a dozen stories, with bookshelves lining every wall. Thousands of books. Tens of thousands.
“That’s just the third floor,” says Ronan, leaning over a wooden railing. “There are two more floors below it.”
“Are you serious?”
I’m jogging down the ramp now, scanning the books as I go by. Histories, biographies, dictionaries of languages I’ve never heard of, books of poetry and music. The ceiling is painted with men and women in ancient robes frolicking in nature and recording observations on scrolls.
I understand their joy. It's beautiful here. It’s everything everyone knows about the entire world, all of it in one miraculous place.
I pick a book at random off the shelf. “A Complete Study of Brakkari Architecture, 3rd Century to 5th.” I don’t know the first thing about Brakkari architecture.
Looking around here, I realize I know so little about anything. It’s overwhelming. “There’s an entire world out there I know nothing about.”
“That’s why I brought you here,” says Ronan, taking my hands after I put the book back.
“You said you wanted to see the world. I thought we could make a list of places to go. There’s a section—where are we?
” He leans out to read the nearest sign.
“There’s a section a couple of floors down with maps and travel accounts.
It should be much more up-to-date than the books you had back at home.
That is, if you want to. If you wanted to do that with me tonight.
I wouldn’t have to come on the trip with you, if you didn’t want me to. We could just plan it.”
His eyes dart away, suddenly shy. I understand why he’s worried: this was the trip I’d told him about in honor of my father, and he still doesn’t know if I’d want to take it with him.
But just the fact that he remembered what I told him, that he arranged all of this so he could help me, that’s enough for me to know what I want.
“This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me,” I say, tears in my eyes. I lean forward and kiss him softly on the lips. “I only want to go if it’s with you.”
He smiles so brightly he’s glowing. “Come on,” he says, leading down the ramp.
We spend hours sorting through the volumes, unfurling great scrolls of maps onto a wide table exclusively for that purpose until late into the night. Ronan takes notes in an elegant script, filling a blank book with ideas, references, and even rough sketches of some of the things I wish to see.
“It says there’s a statue of an octopus covering a woman’s breasts. And it’s thirty feet high,” I say, holding out a book to show him.
“Well, that I have to see. Should we add Larunia back then?”
“We better.”
I love the “we.” I’m not sure where we were in the world—somewhere past Brakkar but not yet to Velmora—when we started saying it, but we haven’t been able to stop since.
He looks up and gives me a shy smile when he sees me watching him. And it’s such a small thing, just a tiny, fleeting moment, one of thousands since we’ve met, but something about it breaks me in half.
I love him, I realize suddenly. I’ve known it, I’ve felt it, but looking at him, the sleep in his eyes, the barely suppressed yawn on his lips as he keeps going, unable to stop himself from giving me what I want, I can’t deny it any longer.
I let the thoughts take form, let them take shape in my mind, wrapping myself around them.
Rebuilding myself with them into something better than I was.
I love him. I want nothing but him.
But there are other thoughts taking shape as well. Guilty thoughts full of shame and regret.
I love him, but I don’t deserve him. How can I wash away the stain of what we came here to do? What my family is still trying to do to him, to his people? Even if I can stop it, how could I ever look at him and think I’m worthy of him? Worthy to be his queen?
A queen that conspired to wage a war against her people.
He has stopped writing, sensing my feelings.
When he gets a look at my face, he stands immediately and rushes to where I stand against the map table, holding my head in his hands. Tears spring into my eyes at his touch. I clamp my mouth shut and try not to cry.
“Hey,” he says softly, pulling me to him. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t deserve you,” I choke out through sobs. The gentleness of his hands, the warmth of his voice. It makes me sob even harder, clinging to his chest, my body shaking.
“Hey,” he says again. “It’s okay. Look at me, Sylvie.”
I can’t. I can’t look at him. I’m not good enough for him.
“Sylvie,” he says, gently but firmly. He lifts my chin until I’m looking into his eyes.
“Do you have any idea how rare you are? How few people there in the world like you? Do you know how many people deny what they see with their own eyes? Do you know how many of them refuse to see the truth even when it’s right in front of them?