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Except she really did, so the fact I had to let that go ate at me. How did I know she didn’t delete it all to cover up her crimes of something?
I actually locked on to that thought now that I had some distance from the situation and decided to have Myriam or someone with her father investigate that woman. I shouldn’t let this go even if I did publicly.
Settled with that, I focused on my food… Until my gaze caught something on Mother’s vast bookshelves. Then I stared at it, the edge of a memory or something tickling my brain. It was like right there, but it also looked like a normal leather-bound book.
Except it wasn’t. I’d seen Mother writing in it once. I’d asked her about it and she told me it was her book to write letters.
Which was a stupid lie because a queen would never write letters on pages that tore and looked unrefined like that. I mean, fine, it could have been where she wrote the drafts of letters, but it seemed… Hinky? She’d hurried to close it and changed the topic like I’d caught her doing something.
And I’d never seen it again.
I had snuck up on her. I had done something I shouldn’t have—I honestly forgot what, but I remembered being nervous to talk to her, especially because it was the rare time I was home. I was certain she was going to get mad and send me back to school early.
Again.
I wiped my hands and stood, going over to the shelf and staring at the book.
It was suspiciously nondescript in shelves of obviously expensive editions of hardcover and rare books.
I studied the shelves and easily found ten like I was looking at one of those puzzles where the goal is to find strawberries drawn into the picture where they normally didn’t belong.
These were hiding in plain sight.
I snorted. Watch, with my luck, my mother was a spy or sleeping with one of the elders—something so horribly ridiculous that it would just be the icing on the fucked-up cake that was my life.
My dragons chuckled but said that was a bit over the top even for what I’d been through. I agreed and reached for the book, eyeing over the leather cover. It was well worn, noticeably handled a lot.
Was Father controlling and she couldn’t just have journals that he wouldn’t read? Did she feel trapped somehow?
I filed that away for later as I opened to a random page in the middle… And almost dropped it.
Because it wasn’t written in the universal language of Velusia, the common language our whole world spoke.
“If she really was a fucking spy, I’m finding the delivered wine gift from Khirriln,” I whispered as my hands shook. It was hard not to laugh at the absurdity of this when Eloise reminded me I had ordered the wine to be delivered to my suite because… Why not?
I narrowed my eyes at the writing. It didn’t look like Mother’s elegant cursive, yet it was hers. I knew it was.
Snapping the book closed, I went over to the small desk she did write letters and more at. I yanked open drawers, and it was the third drawer that I found what I wanted. There on a notepad was her quick “chicken scratch” printing that she hated people seeing.
Father had said once that her horrible printing was the reason all of my writing was inelegant. He had been teasing her while chastising me, but it had stung enough for me to remember.
All of his criticisms had.
I opened the book again—clearly her journal and swallowed loudly. It was in the language of the trolls, a nation not even on our continent or landmass.
A language my father didn’t know.
A language I didn’t know my mother knew.
And one my parents didn’t know I did.
“What the actual fuck?” I whispered as I flipped through the pages, my brain trying to catch up with this. It was absolutely her printing even if she always got rid of the evidence that she wrote like that. Her cursive was flawless, but it took her longer than probably most.
I just wasn’t patient enough to care that much. Mine wasn’t horrible and like… Seriously, get over it and stop being petty.
I didn’t realize I was sitting on the ground until my knee ached from being pressed against the bookshelf awkwardly. That snapped me out of it and I managed to stand and started grabbing the other oddly nondescript leather books.
They were all in her printing. All in the language of the trolls.
“Was she seriously a fucking spy? For a country we have a horrible relationship with and they refused to send me to?” I whispered as I felt the need to sit again, my heart beating in my ears.
They hadn’t wanted me to learn that language.
“They didn’t want you to waste time learning any languages,” my fire dragon, Iris, reminded me in my mind.
That was true. They thought it was all futile and something I could do later when I had time and was bored—so never.
But I found it all interesting and learned a lot from extra classes they didn’t know about or my classmates.
It was easy for me, and I thought it helped me understand international issues better.
Most times, when people butted heads or had issues, it was because they weren’t seeing things from the same place. Language could play a part in that. A lot of nations still learned their original languages, not just the international one. They valued their heritage and held onto it tightly.
I’d won a lot of favor with people understanding that.
“Read some and set yourself at ease,” Iris said gently when I kept spinning out and was about to tear through all the bookshelves to see what else I could find.
Right.
Smart.
Logical.
Except what I read did anything but put me at ease.
It broke my fucking soul.