Speaker and Calligrapher | Vida Cruz-Borja #2
“You will be named Head Librarian,” Lin insisted. “I’m no expert, but from what I’ve heard of your proposal, I think you’ve got a really good shot at it. I just want to celebrate with you using some of that sweet Head Librarian salary.”
It was perhaps the first time he’d ever complimented her without insulting her in the same breath. She rose from her seat and descended the steps. When she got within a foot of Lin, she extended her hand.
“Deal.”
Lin slid off the desk and firmly shook her hand, which all but disap peared in his.
She could feel every inch of his hand; each and every callous brought on new waves of shame, brought home how soft her own hands were from lack of practice.
Not to mention, Lin was a lot closer than she had ever let him be.
She caught a faint whiff of his soap: cedarwood and some thing citrusy.
“Deal. And I’ll have the contract ready for signing by tomorrow morning.”
* * *
Through a Reading Room door’s glass panel, Verda spotted bars of afternoon sunlight lying across the red carpet – one mockingly highlighting the tattered remains of her leather spell pouch, pens, the singed pieces of her notebook, and the explosion of ink.
Tiny curls of smoke still rose from the heap.
They had ducked into one of the Reading Rooms just as the beam fired, but it had nipped her spell pouch at the last moment. She could still feel the heat of the beam where it had come so close to her hip.
She slid to the floor, letting loose the sigh suffocating in her chest on the way down, and replaced it with a deep gulp of the familiar smell of old books and older cedarwood shelves.
The Library was a library, archive, museum, school, and city all rolled into one, and she had thought of it as home for the last decade or so, but apparently its vast rooms hadn’t yet run out of surprises, pleasant or unpleasant.
“All clear,” she said. She peered more closely at Lin, who sat propped up against the wall beside her. Specifically, at a darker stain on the azure of his junior librarian’s robes that hadn’t been there when they first entered the room. “Wait, you’re bleeding!”
Lin flashed a wincing smile. His sprain must have been worse than Verda thought if he wasn’t even giving his grin a hundred and ten percent. “The good news is that this isn’t blood.”
“Oh, thank the gods—”
“The bad news is that this was the red ink. A crack formed in the bottle and it all leaked out. We only have the black one left.”
“The gods hate me. They absolutely hate me.” Verda pulled her knees up to her chin and bit the edge of her thumb.
Lin made a valiant attempt at making himself more comfortable against the wall and tried to engage her in light conversation. “What’s more difficult for you, Snowflake – a calligraphy test, or this?”
“I don’t think there’s an answer that allows me to keep my dignity intact.”
“No? I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d picked the calligraphy test,” Lin quipped brightly, despite the sweat trickling down the side of his face.
“Now’s not the time for insults—”
“I’m actually trying to tell you that I believe you can do this.”
“Oh.” Their gazes met, but hers was too heavy with guilt to hold his for long.
I could have deactivated the golem earlier if I hadn’t been distracted, she thought. Then you wouldn’t have gotten hurt. You wouldn’t be like this if I hadn’t partnered with you.
She scrutinized Lin’s right hand – his spell hand.
It had been tender to the touch, inflamed, and the scrunch of Lin’s eyebrows deepened with each movement.
Definitely couldn’t write spells in that condition.
He cradled it in his lap, now somewhat haphazardly bandaged with the midnight blue strip she’d torn off her best senior librarian’s robe.
There hadn’t been time for thoroughness.
Lin had protested, saying that she shouldn’t show up to the successorship test looking so shoddy, and she’d snapped that her appearance was the least of their problems if they couldn’t even escape this maze.
She could write on the fabric the Aarakese spellwords for cooling injured muscles. Her handwriting wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as his, but Verda was capable of that much written logomancy at least.
“Let me have some of your ink.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Heal you, obviously.” Verda reached for Lin’s spell pouch when his left hand shot out and stopped hers.
No, not just stopped it. Took her fingers and slowly rubbed his thumb back and forth over her knuckles.
It was a lulling gesture, bordering on sensual and meant to comfort, but it only filled her with more guilt.
And because she wasn’t very good at feeling her feelings, it bubbled up in her throat as vexation.
What was Lin doing, comforting her when he was the one who needed it more?
“I’ll let you have the ink, but save it for the golem,” he said.
To her shock, her eyes began to water. She blinked it away and hoped he hadn’t noticed. Lin was confident, verging on cocky, but she’d come to realize that was just a facade. He had moments like this, when he put himself down needlessly, and she hated it.
“Hey now, I hope you’re not feeling sorry about our predicament,” Lin murmured, eyes on her fingers (since when had they begun to tremble?), “because you did nothing wrong.”
What does he know? Verda thought with a bitterness that could punch a hole through the floor. He wasn’t the one who was too slow.
* * *
The first of the four spells from Verda’s proposal was meant to penetrate the thick carbonized coating of any books and scrolls found in the Aarakarsh digs – a specimen of which sat on the far end of the table Verda and Lin shared, on loan from Archivist Shadani and the Office of Aarakese Texts for the day.
It would be one thing to see through two-thousand-year-old hardened lava to the book’s text beneath, and another thing entirely to be able to actually read it – but the latter was not part of the scope of the problem, not at all.
Lin looked up from Verda’s notebook, a spread of which was crammed end-to-end with her ideas, specifications, and mocked-up diagrams inked in red and black for this spell.
“Snowflake,” he hazarded, “what am I looking at?”
“Haven’t you been listening?” Verda snapped. She’d spent the last five minutes explaining what she wanted out of the spell, and it irritated her to think that Lin hadn’t been paying attention.
“Oh, I was listening, all right,” Lin said. He turned the notebook around and bookmarked the spread with his index finger for her to see. “But what I’m seeing looks like it was scratched out by a chicken having a seizure.”
Verda snatched her notebook back and used it to whack his shoulder.
For their afternoon meeting, she had borrowed a smaller private Reading Room off the seventh-floor main corridor, where few librarians or patrons ever went – and she praised her own foresight for having done so.
Her pride wouldn’t be able to withstand anyone else overhearing Lin’s unfortunately true assessment of her handwriting.
“Trust me, if I could do it myself, I wouldn’t be here with you right now. So, can you do it or not?”
Lin held up his empty hands – in surrender or mockery, who could tell with that annoyingly chagrined smile, as if he found her both pitiful and amusing – and said, “Of course I can. I think, given your timeframe and any testing, it should take about three weeks.”
Three weeks? If each spell took three weeks to construct and become viable, then Verda would be barely done by the day of the successorship test. She spread her fingers on the tabletop, leaned in close. “What can I do to help speed up your process?”
“Hmm, well, dinner at Artivisi’s tonight sounds good—”
“Aside from that.”
Lin laced his fingers under his chin. The cheer evaporated from his face, replaced by an uncharacteristic seriousness, as he, too, leaned in close. “Tell me what you’re going to do once you’re Head Librarian.”
Verda hadn’t expected that. She straightened up and shifted uneasily, her notebook lying forgotten on the table.
No one had ever asked her that before – not even Agreha, whose companionship was very welcome but who had assumed from the beginning that escaping an arranged marriage was the be-all and end-all of Verda’s stay at the Library.
Talking about her plans felt just as difficult as keeping Aarakarsh’s carbonized books intact during an excavation.
Her old habit of twirling a lock of hair whenever she found herself unusually lost for words came slithering back.
“I have a younger brother,” she said at last, keeping her eyes on a window to the west, which overlooked the glinting waters of Crescent Bay.
“Ivinder. Our father describes him as mute, but that’s not right; Ivinder just doesn’t use words to express himself.
He’s extremely bright, but our father just can’t see it.
He denied him the chance for even private tutoring when the rest of his children were educated at the Library.
“Before I came here, I took charge of Ivinder’s education… if I could simply go back to our estate and live as before, I would. But I can’t. If I could become Head Librarian, however… I’d make the Library and its school so much easier to access for people like Ivinder.”
There was a long, unbearable silence that followed. When Verda finally dared to look at Lin, his chin was still pillowed on his fingers, but now his expression was thoughtful.
“What?” Verda hazarded, a defensive note coloring the word as her eyebrows scrunched.
“That kind of care you have for your brother,” Lin said, his stare pointed at the carbonized scroll to his right. He didn’t seem to be looking at it so much as a memory deep inside his brain. “I can sort of understand it. Can’t relate to it, but I can sort of understand.”
“You have a brother?” This was the first time Verda had ever heard any thing about Lin’s past. How novel.