Chapter 16.5 The Archives
"Are you...still hungry?" Marton asks. Of all things, he sounds worried. About me. Still. I swallow the lump in my throat.
"No. I'm alright."
Marton sighs. "Should we talk about...?" He trails off, and I can't imagine what in particular he's referring to.
There are so many things we should probably talk about.
"I want to know," he says finally. "How much you need to eat, and how often.
You never... You didn't tell us before, that you needed to eat more than a human. I didn't know." He sounds guilty.
"I've been—It was on purpose," I assure him. "I've never...I've never eaten as much as I wanted. We couldn't afford it when I was young, and it freaked my mother out—and everyone else—anyway. So I just," I shrug, "learned to eat less."
"You don't have to act human in front of me," he says quietly. When I turn to look at him, he's studying the coverlet.
I worry it's going to be like this between us now. Awkward and strained.
"We should get to the...researching," I say.
Marton nods, pushing off the bed. "I've narrowed it down to a few specific archives.
One is full of essays written about the subjects of archaic artwork, from around the same time period as the sketch we saw in the hallway yesterday.
The others are full of writings about dragons and wyverns, respectively. "
"Sounds promising," I mutter. I follow him out into the hallway, straightening my borrowed tunic as it tries to slip off my shoulder again. Marton makes no comment about it, nor about my barefooted condition.
We exit the dormitories and make our way across the sidewalks and courtyards of the Academy campus. There are a few other people about at this hour, but most of them are too busy to give us even a first glance, and none of them give us a second.
We come to a medium-sized, square building, constructed out of the same pale brick as all the others.
Marton pushes the door open, entering a small foyer, where he exchanges a few brief words with the novitiate behind the desk.
He signs his name on a scroll of parchment, then, with a glance at me, he signs my name too.
Tarah Hastings swirls across the page in his elegant script, and my pulse goes haywire. Nope. No. That is not for you, the practical part of my brain reminds me.
Marton takes us down a corridor, and then down a narrow hall branching off from it.
Eventually, we come to a large, high-ceilinged room, lit by windows set high on the wall, which cast a hazy light down into the room below.
The room itself is cluttered with shelves of scrolls and books and assorted small objects I can't guess the reason for.
It's thick with the smell of dust and old parchment.
"Which archive is this?"
"This is the first room of the wing dedicated to research on the subjects of archaic artwork."
"And we just...pick something up at random?" I eye the endless stacks of research with anxiety. It could take years to work through all of this.
"Not quite," says Marton, stepping towards one shelf. "Each section is dated, you see, and cross referenced by subject matter and region of origin." He gestures to a placard on the end of the shelf, which contains a series of letters and dashes, carefully printed. It means nothing at all to me.
"Lead the way."
Marton's lips twist, and he eyes the shelves around us.
He starts down the row, eyeing the labels on each shelf as we pass it.
Eventually, he comes to one that seems to satisfy him.
"This should be a good starting point. I'm not sure of the exact date of the illustration we saw, but I've estimated, and I'm assuming it was done somewhere around Ithyma—probably in Olio or Philostia at the furthest." He pats the placard.
"Now we just skim and look for something that sounds like it refers to a place where dragons and wyverns gathered. "
I follow him uncertainly down the aisle, watching as he pulls out a thick tome from the bottom shelf.
He holds it almost reverently, like someone would cradle a child, and his hands are careful on the pages as he turns them.
My fingers skim over the spines of several books, but I hesitate to disturb them.
This, too, seems like a place that does not belong to me. A thing that is not for me.
Seeing my hesitation, Marton pauses over his book, his eyes darting up to me. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Finally, he asks, "Can you—Can you read?" He tries very hard to look as if the answer doesn't matter much one way or another, but I'm still offended.
I scoff. And then I hesitate. It is not an unfair question. I probably learned to read much later in life than he did. "Cherry taught me," I admit. "She had two books with her when we went to the tower. One was a collection of stories, and the other was a book of constellations."
How long we spent, bent over those books together, or looking up at the sky, when there was nothing else to do.
"I only know a few constellations," Marton says. "Just the ones that have legends attached."
The thought makes me almost smile. "Do you know the Captive Queen and the Stone Giant?"
Marton nods, smiling too.
"Those were Cherry's favorite constellations," I confide. "She liked any story full of excitement and romance."
"What kind of stories did you like?"
My smile dissolves. As he's always done, he's trying to make things about me again. "I don't care for stories at all," I lie. "I just put up with them for Cherry's sake."
His smile dies too, and he looks back down at his book.
I pull out a tome of my own, barely seeing it as I flip through the pages.
For a while, we just turn pages in silence.
I recover myself enough to squint down at the jumble of text on the page, trying to make sense of the scrawling hand.
Another book proves to be done with set type, which is easier for me to read.
It's nothing that we're looking for, though.
Book after book. Scroll after scroll. We dig through the archive until the air is full of dust around us and I can't stop sneezing. Marton seems immune.
After a bit more of this, my patience wears thin. I'm thinking how much easier this would be if there were a protectorkin scholar we could ask, who might already have the information that we need.
When the light starts to change outside, signally the onset of afternoon, I'm itching uncontrollably and have already held a funeral for and buried my long dead patience.
I slam shut the book I'm holding. Marton, seated on the floor amid a nest of books and scrolls, doesn't even look up from the text his nose is buried in.
I roll my eyes, stomping off down the aisle for a breath of fresh air.
There's none to be had, so I pace to the edges of the room, wishing for nothing so much as the chance to spread my wings.
We're all alone in this deserted room...
But on inspection, there's no room to shift in here, and I give up the idea in disappointment.
Along the end of one wall, by a door, I spot something hanging up that captures my interest. It isn't a painting, nor artwork of any kind.
It's an old calendar, showing what I assume are ancient feast days or dates of some other forgone significance.
But it sends a chill down my spine.
Turning on my heel, I hurry back to the spot where I left Marton, slamming to a stop with my bare toes an inch from the edge of the book he's reading.
"What day is it?" I nearly cry.
"Tarah?" he goggles at me. "What is it? What's the matter?"
"What day is it!?"
"I-I'm not sure. A few days from the autumn equinox, I think." He eyes me with obvious distress. "What's going on? Why do you need to know the date?"
I sit down hard on the floor across from him, drawing my knees up to curl myself around the sudden pain in my chest. "I think it might be Cherry's birthday," I whisper through a tight throat.
"Now, or soon, or it could have been yesterday.
I don't know. I don't—Marton, I've never missed her birthday. We've never been apart—"
"Tarah," Marton says seriously. "It's alright. We'll—You won't—" He takes a deep breath, steeling himself. "We'll get her back. You may be apart for now, for this, but it's just a day. She'll be alright."
"She'll be alone. On her birthday."
"Vakhrin is with her."
"Maybe," I whisper, hugging myself. "Maybe. If he's still alive. If they're being kept together. I hope...I hope he is with her. That she has someone to take care of her."
Marton looks at me for a long moment. "Tarah...Cherry is a grown woman."
"She's sixteen! Seventeen," I amend. "But she's not—she can't—"
"Is it possible," he asks quietly, "that you need to feel that you're taking care of her, maybe even more than she actually needs to be cared for?"
"What," I grit out, "are you talking about?"
"Codependency."
I huff an annoyed breath. "I don't know that word."
"It's when...one person needs to feel needed, and the other person feeds this feeling for them, by.
..making demands and...needing things. It's more complicated than that, but it's not anyone's idea of a healthy relationship.
It's...toxic. It makes it so neither person can quite function on their own. "
"And this is just a thing you know about?"
"It's—It's a psychological term," he admits. "I read it in a book once, when I lived with my parents."
"Six years ago."
"It's still relevant, Tarah. I just—I don't want you to put yourself in a bad situation. You've already been in enough of them..."
"I don't need you taking care of me! Understand?" I spring to my feet. "I don't need to be watched over, or looked after. Not by you. Not by anyone. It's my job to take care of—" I clamp my mouth shut as I realize what I was about to say.
I narrow my eyes at him before he can gloat. "I told you before," I accuse. "I told you I didn't know how to be a normal sort of friend, and you told me that it was alright."
I turn and fling myself back down the aisles of shelves, avoiding his response.