23. Chapter 23 #2
I should be offended. I am offended. I’m also intrigued, which is unfortunate because intrigue has led me into nearly every terrible situation of my life.
“By all means, keep going. What importance?”
Brother Rivero clutches the book in his hands a little tighter. “Perhaps frightened was too strong a word.”
“Brother Rivero.”
He winces. “Right. Yes. Directness. I have been told it saves time, though in my experience it often creates more difficulties.”
“I think you should try it anyway.”
He exhales and gestures toward a narrower aisle between two shelves. “Silver hair.”
The words land and my entire body stiffens. Riven’s attention sharpens beside me.
Brother Rivero notices and lowers his voice. “I’ve heard that you’ve asked before about Queen Seraphine.”
“I asked because she had hair like mine. I saw the portrait down here.”
“Yes,” he says, moving down the aisle. “And that is where many people make the first mistake.”
I follow him, my stomach tightening with each step. “What mistake?”
“They assume blood.”
He pulls a heavy book from the shelf, then immediately struggles under its weight. Riven reaches over and takes it from him before it can crush his foot.
“Thank you,” Brother Rivero says.
Riven nods once.
Brother Rivero clears a space on a nearby table, and Riven sets the book down with a dull thud that echoes through the quiet archive.
The cover is cracked black leather, reinforced with silver corners tarnished nearly gray with age.
Symbols have been pressed into the surface, the same curling marks I’ve seen carved into the oldest corridors of the palace. Brother Rivero opens it carefully.
The pages are thick, yellowed, and covered in tight script broken by illustrations.
He turns past kings, temples, and maps of a Solaris that looks far greener than anything I have ever known.
Finally, he stops at a drawing of Queen Seraphine.
Silver hair spills over her shoulders in painted waves.
I hate the jolt of recognition it sends through me.
Not because she looks like me. She doesn’t.
But the hair is impossible to ignore. That bright, unnatural silver.
The mark Elvora taught me to hide, the thing that made mothers pull children away from me and lower their voices when I passed. There it is, painted on a queen.
Not a cursed queen. A crowned one.
My throat tightens.
Brother Rivero watches me with gentler eyes now, which somehow makes me want to be sharp.
“What does this have to do with blood?” I ask.
“Old texts assumed that those marked with silver descended from Seraphine,” he says. “Some old noble houses used to claim connection to her whenever silver appeared in their lines, though most of those claims were political and poorly supported. The stronger records suggest something else.”
Riven stands a little straighter and I notice. Of course I notice.
“What records?”
Brother Rivero turns another page, revealing a fragment copied in red and black ink.
“Manifestation,” he says. “Not inheritance.” The word settles over the table.
I stare at him. “That sounds like something scholars say when they want to sound impressive.”
“It is,” he admits. “But in this case, it is useful.”
“Please explain. I’m extremely lost.”
He brightens, and I know immediately I have made a mistake. He obviously loves explaining things. If he had a tail, it would be wagging.
“The silver mark appears in scattered records across centuries, never consistently within the same bloodline and rarely more than once in a generation. Seraphine had it, yes, but there were others. A healer in the northern marshes. A child from the ash villages. A woman executed during the second famine because people believed she caused the crops to fail, though later weather records suggest the drought began years before her birth, so that accusation was both tragic and absurd.”
I blink. “You have weather records?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” I repeat, because apparently that is where my life has brought me. Standing in a forbidden archive at night, discussing weather records with a scholar-priest while slowly discovering my hair may be part of a divine pattern instead of a personal inconvenience.
Brother Rivero turns another page. “The temple scholars believed the silver appeared when Illurine’s power chose a vessel strong enough to hold it.”
The room seems to go still as I look at the page. Not at Brother Rivero. Not at Riven. The page.
“When the divine goddess… chooses…” I say.
Is this why Thorin has me here? Does he believe I am the Cursebreaker because I have silver hair?
Is that why he has been hunting me my entire life?
Is that why he… is that why he had my parents killed?
I swallow the lump forming in my throat, because I’m having a hard time reconciling the man I know with the one I was told killed my parents.
Brother Rivero nods slowly as his words bring me back to the conversation. “That was their interpretation.”
“People are not cups.”
“No.”
“And gods don’t simply pour power into someone because the world has become inconvenient.”
Brother Rivero hesitates. “Some would argue that is exactly what gods do.”
I glare at him. He wisely looks back at the page.
My hands curl against the edge of the table.
A vessel. Chosen by Illurine. The words should feel ridiculous.
Grand, impossible, the sort of nonsense prophets shout in marketplaces before someone drags them away.
But instead they settle into places I did not know were waiting for them.
My magic stirs beneath my skin and I press my palms flat against the wood.
“No,” I whisper.
Riven shifts beside me. “Lyra.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are gripping the table hard enough to crack it.”
I look down. A thin line of silver-gold light glows beneath my fingers and I notice that the wood is warm. I snatch my hands away as my face flushes with embarrassment.
“Fantastic.”
Brother Rivero looks less afraid than he should. If anything, he looks fascinated, which makes me want to throw the heavy book at him and also ask him six more questions.
“What else?” I demand.
He swallows. “There are prophecy fragments.”
Riven’s face changes.
“Brother Rivero,” he says carefully.
Brother Rivero winces. “I know.”
“Then perhaps do not.”
“Too late,” I say. “He already said prophecy. You cannot unsay prophecy. I heard it. My ears are involved.”
Riven looks deeply tired of my shit.
Good.
Now he knows how I feel.
Brother Rivero glances toward the archive doors as if expecting Thorin himself to appear simply because we have wandered near a forbidden subject. He doesn’t. Yet.
“Fragments only,” Brother Rivero says, lowering his voice. “Most copies were damaged or deliberately altered. Some lines contradict others, and prophecy is notoriously unreliable because people tend to edit fate whenever it becomes politically inconvenient.”
“I like that sentence more than I should.”
“Thank you,” he says, smugly.
“Don’t get proud now. Continue, please.”
He turns several pages toward the back of the volume, where older parchment has been stitched into the binding. The writing there is faded, certain words missing entirely where time has eaten through the ink. Brother Rivero traces the lines without touching them.
“When darkness devours the land,” he reads softly, but I cut him off.
“I’ve heard this part, Brother Rivero.”
Brother Rivero continues, voice quieter now. “Yes, I know what scroll Brother Tolum gave you. I think he left out the part where he can translate the Old Language. His innocence hides secrets, Lady Tarethyn. The part he did not mention to you when he mistranslated, purposely, I might add, was:
Marked in silver.
Born beneath the dying sky.
Bearer of life where death has taken root.
I give a Cursebreaker to restore what was taken.
Riven looks toward the doors but I don’t. I can’t. The page blurs for half a second before I force it back into focus.
“That could mean anyone,” I say, but my voice sounds too thin. Too uncertain.
“It says marked in silver.”
“Perhaps there are many silver-haired women running around Solaris.”
“I do hate to inform you that there are not.”
“Perhaps scholars exaggerated.”
“They often do.”
“Perhaps this has nothing to do with me.”
Brother Rivero’s expression is painfully gentle and I immediately despise it.
“Perhaps,” he says softly.
Liar. Everyone in this palace is a terrible liar.
I lean closer to the page, searching for the next line. “What does it say after bearer of life?”
Brother Rivero doesn’t answer so I follow his gaze. The lower half of the page has been torn away. Not damaged. Torn. This was done deliberately so that someone—perhaps nosy and stubborn, like me—wouldn’t find it.
My stomach turns cold. “Who tore it?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s a popular answer around here. I don’t get any answers around here, actually.”
“I truly don’t.”
Riven says nothing, which is worse. I look at him. “Do you?”
“No.”
Too quick. Just like Onyx, he answered too quickly and looked off to cover the lie. Why are men so easy to read?
Not a lie, perhaps. But not the whole truth either. I’m becoming an expert in the shape of withheld things.
I turn back to the torn page. “There has to be another copy.”
Brother Rivero hesitates.
Ah. There it is. That’s all I needed. Hope, horrible thing that it is, rises before I can stop it.
“Where?”
“The king’s private archives,” he says.
Riven curses under his breath and I look between them. “Wonderful. My favorite kind of archive.”
“No,” Riven says immediately.
“You don’t even know what I was going to say.”
“You’re going to ask how to get there.”
“I was going to ask politely.” I smile sweetly at him, but his expression hardens. It doesn't look like he's in a particularly accommodating mood today.
“No, you were not.”
“No,” I admit. “But I like that you believed I might.”
Brother Rivero shifts nervously. “The restricted archives are sealed by royal command.”
“Thorin’s command?”
“Yes, the king’s command.”