Chapter 26. Now Maris
NOW: MARIS
The Citadel was cloaked in an eerie silence as I made my way up through the east corridor, headed for the Hall of Scribes. When I passed beneath the place where my mother’s portrait had once hung, it was still empty.
The idea had come to me in the middle of the night as I sat in the window, watching the fires of the New Legion’s camp on the other side of the Sophanes.
I’d stared into the blinking lights, remembering Luca’s eyes as they ran over my face.
His hand as it reached through the air to find me.
I’d been replaying that moment in my mind over and over, wishing that I had pressed my lips to the tears that striped his cheek.
All I could think now was that I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the chance again.
It was something Luca had said that sparked the idea.
Whatever had been used as the key for the message wouldn’t be easily accessed.
I’d gone through every text in my mother’s study, as well as her chambers in the Tribunal Hall.
Scrolls were valuable and expensive, purchased as handwritten copies from the ones housed in the Citadel’s Hall of Scribes.
Even if I had the kind of access that would allow me to go through every single original that existed there, it would take years.
But the scribes were diligent, dedicated to preserving each and every one. There was a record for everything.
The Consul was communicating with someone, but for what purpose?
The only ones left outside the walls were the legionnaires who’d been lucky enough to be posted outside the gates when the fighting began.
They hadn’t been forced to pick a side, and there’d been no reports given about them in the Forum that were of any consequence.
The highborn families who had left weren’t soldiers, which meant there was little they could do for us now.
What twisted my mind was the question of why the Consul would keep what he was doing from the Magistrates.
If there was one thing the Forum had been unified on, it was keeping the New Legion from advancing across from the Lower City.
If the Consul had a plan to save Isara, what reason could he have to conceal it?
When I came through the open doors of the Hall of Scribes, I was relieved to see Drakon seated at the post. The young scribe who’d been only a novice to my uncle before the war began had been granted an expedited advancement with the dwindling number of officials who remained in the Citadel.
Now he was overseeing the inventory of the entire library.
He sat with stylus in hand, not looking up as I entered.
The afternoon light was filled with the mist of the sea, draping the grand room in a haze and making his fair hair glisten.
He was hunched over the desk, concentrating on a line of writing he was copying from a faded scroll, and for a moment he looked untouched by all that had happened.
But as the stylus made its last stroke, his gaze lifted to meet mine and I could see it—that gaping emptiness where hope had once been.
His eyes narrowed before moving past me to the hall. “Casperia.” He looked surprised to see me.
“Drakon.”
Carefully, he set the stylus down. The contents of the desk were organized, the entrance to the hall polished and gleaming. But it was empty and cold, making me wonder how often anyone walked through these doors anymore.
“I heard about your mother. Figured it might not be long before I saw you in here.” He stood from his chair, smoothing his hands over his robes. “How can I help?”
The words flashed through my mind in a script I’d rehearsed that morning. “I’m looking for a scroll my mother was referencing in one of her chronicles. I’m afraid I don’t know the name.”
He frowned. “Do you know what class or theorem it might be under?”
“Agriculture, I believe.”
A brief glimmer of some veiled reaction moved across his face, and I regretted my choice of theorem.
Agriculture had been the only thing anyone had talked about for the last year, with a number of conspiracies festering about the fields, the Philosopher Vitrasian, and the Priestess Ophelius.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now that my request could be seen in connection with any number of them.
Especially when I’d served as a novice in the temple.
“Well, that does narrow it down quite a bit,” Drakon said.
He took a small slip of parchment from a stack on the desk and stood, going to the large open book on the stone pedestal behind him. I watched as he flipped back through the pages with careful hands, eyes scanning the names until he finally stopped.
“Here we are.” He let the book fall open, the tip of the stylus scratching as he made a note. “Looks like there’s only one that she requested in the last year.”
When he turned back to me, his eyes dropped to the chain around my neck. “Just need to see your medallion.”
“Of course.” I pulled at the chain, letting the flat gold circle fall from the opening of my chiton.
Drakon took a thorough look at it before he wrote my name into the book and recorded the scroll.
“Just a moment.”
He gave me a polite smile before he went through the archway, where I could see two other scribes working over their colored inkpots.
They kept their attention on the careful movement of their styluses over the parchment, and I tried to make out what exactly they were doing.
It all seemed so meaningless now, and maybe that was the point.
Weren’t we all just waiting for the end to come?
As soon as the curtain to the library fell closed, I listened for Drakon’s footsteps to fade. The scrolls in the agriculture class were shelved at the farthest end of the hall, but it wouldn’t take him long to find what he was looking for. I had to be quick.
I rounded the desk, stepping with light feet until I reached the pedestal and set my hand on the page Drakon had it turned to before flipping ahead.
The latest entries weren’t nearly as frequent as they’d been in the months before the war, but there were still officials requesting scrolls regularly.
I frantically searched for the Consul’s name, but there was no Saturian listed.
I couldn’t find a single entry that belonged to him.
Instead, I started looking for patterns.
If the series of messages were all using the same key, the scroll would be requested multiple times.
And I was right. There was one that repeated on every page for the last few weeks, at least.
Tale of Hermaus.
But the request was listed from a different person each time, and I didn’t recognize any of the family names. I didn’t know how that was possible. Drakon followed the rules to the letter. I couldn’t imagine him falsifying the records. Not even for the Consul.
I let the pages fall to where Drakon had left them and returned to the other side of the desk. Only seconds later, Drakon came back through the curtain with the scroll protectively cradled in his arms.
“I’m so sorry, Drakon, I forgot I need one more. But this one, I do know the name of.”
“Not a problem.” He handed me the scroll. “Which is it?”
“Tale of Hermaus,” I said, sounding as if I were asking a question. “It should be in the—”
“Myths,” he finished my sentence. “You can read the first language?”
“I’m learning,” I lied.
He frowned. There was a moment when I was sure that he was going to press me. That his curiosity would make him think a little harder about what I was asking.
“Just one moment.”
He pushed back through the curtain and I exhaled, hands slick on the carved ends of the scroll. The label identified it as a record of the grain harvest three years before, which meant my mother had been doing her own research.
I stared at the book on the pedestal as the seconds ticked by, my heart in my throat. I could feel the distance my loyalty was about to fall. I wasn’t just a Magistrate’s daughter anymore, and my mother was no longer here to protect me.
This was what I’d wanted—to wear the white robes and cast the judgment stone in defiance of the Forum. But here I was, playing the same twisted games they all were.
When Drakon returned, he held the scroll in his hands with the tips of his fingers. It was clearly very old, its handle carved of light ash wood and painted with fading colors. The tie that bound it closed was beaded at each end with spheres of blue glass.
“Here you are.”
I took it, fingers tingling as if they could sense that the scroll held a secret.
Drakon went back to the open book, noting the name of the scroll, and I swallowed hard.
Whoever had been requesting it, they would likely come again.
And when they did, they needed only look in that book to see my name beside it.
It was a clumsy move. A desperate one. But in two days’ time, none of it would matter.
I walked slowly and calmly down the Tribunal Hall, and when I reached the door that said Casperia, I shut myself inside.
The smell of paint was still thick in the air from the drying portrait that sat on the easel beside the window.
My face stared back at me, the dark eyes focused, the set of my mouth defiant.
Here I was in my mother’s chambers, but I looked nothing like her in those robes.
That had been the plan, hadn’t it? I would take my mother’s seat, and Luca would take his uncle’s.
We’d devised a scheme to disrupt the fabric of the Magistrates’ factions, and it would have worked.
If that day in the Forum hadn’t happened, if Vitrasian hadn’t been executed, there would have been nothing to stop us.
I lit the lamp and closed the curtains to drape the room in darkness. The sensation of eyes on me was like the feeling of insects crawling over my skin.
I sat down, drawing in a long breath before I untied the scroll and let it unroll across the desk. Firelight cast the parchment in a warm pink as my eyes flitted over the words. The shapes and patterns of the ink were like a long-forgotten memory.
The illustrations that filled the margins were the only translation I needed.
I knew the story well after my years as a novice.
It chronicled one of the first gifts ever bestowed upon mortals.
Hermaus was a winged beast, with great white feathers tipped with gold, and there were many tales of his valiant courage and victories in battle.
But one story—this story—was about one he lost. Hermaus was shot down from the sky and lay bleeding in a field when five traveling Valshadi women came upon him.
They tended to his wounds and stayed with him, forsaking their journey until he was healed.
As repayment for their compassion and kindness, Hermaus plucked five feathers from his wings and gave them as gifts to each of the women.
The illustration at the bottom of the scroll depicted that moment, as he held out a single feather to a woman with her hands lifted reverently, ready to take it.
With that gift, he gave them their magic—and thus the favor of the gods, which would endure for their lifetimes and the lifetime of anyone they saw fit to pass it on to.
The godsblood was a gift. One of the last ever given. Until Luca.
I jolted when the clang of bells echoed out in the Citadel, catching the end of the scroll before it could fall to the floor. They were the tribunal bells. The Consul was calling the Magistrates into the Forum.
I took out the message, finding the corresponding words on the scroll one by one and copying them down on a fresh piece of parchment. The bells chimed again as I stood and blew out the lamp, taking my Magistrate’s robes from where they hung on the wall.
The message burned in my fingertips as I tucked it beneath the silk, against my heart. I couldn’t read it, but I knew someone who could.