Speaker and Calligrapher | Vida Cruz-Borja #5
Verda scrutinized him, thought back on all their time together, evaluating whether Lin was truly a distraction from her goal. She decided she didn’t care. ‘Distraction’ wasn’t what you called someone you loved.
“Good,” she said, her voice coming out hoarse. She threw her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. “It would be awkward if I were the only one.”
* * *
Verda thought waiting for Lin to bring the golem was the hardest part. It made her tap her foot and bite her thumb in agitation as she stood in her hiding spot behind some shelves that placed her directly to the right of and behind the spell circle she’d drawn.
Then she thought the hardest part was hearing Lin burst into the room and sprint past the circle – with an interval of the golem thudding in, its beam zapping the floor – then skid around to face the creature.
But the actual hardest part was when he glanced directly at her, the side of his face illuminated by the charging crystal, and over the loud, escalating whir of the sentinel golem mouthed, “It’ll be all right.”
She wouldn’t get to him in time, and they had no Plan B.
Suddenly, the whirring sputtered, croaked out of rhythm and died. Lin’s face was still lit by the crystal, although its light had dimmed.
Verda emerged from her hiding place, taking with her the closest three-tiered stepstool. The golem stood perfectly still at the center of her spell circle. It looked like it could attack at any moment. She positioned the stepstool between its ginormous iron feet and climbed to the top.
In Aarakese, the word for breath was ‘yui.’ Written as ‘yuinen,’ it meant life.
Inside the golem’s mouth was a deeper depression where a palm-sized slab of red granite – the ‘tongue’ – bearing the word ‘yuinen’ had been inserted.
In the future, as Head Librarian, she would come to appreciate the make of it and order the replication of these golems for Library defense purposes.
But right now, as a mere senior librarian, its face unnerved her.
Verda removed the tongue; the light from the crystal quartz in its eyes and chest flickered out.
Then she turned around and found Lin beaming up at her with pride, the way no one in her life ever had before. Heat suffused her cheeks, perhaps could have outdone the heat of Mount Elhas’ ancient eruption. But all she could say was, “Don’t you ever do that again.”
“As you wish.” Lin bowed, still grinning, as she descended the stepstool. “Now, don’t you have a presentation to prepare for?”
“Hmph,” Verda answered as she alighted from the last step. “All you care about is filling your stomach for free.”
Lin looked thunderstruck. “‘For free’? How have you not yet deduced that I was trying to get you on a date?”
* * *
The last of Verda’s proposed spells, an illusory recreation of the time and place where a text was found or created, was completed four nights before the successorship test. Lin handed it over in the usual Reading Room on the seventh floor.
She was satisfied, though more than a bit sad that these regular meetings would now come to an end.
Verda stretched her arms over her head. “The timeframe is a little tight, but my report needs only a few tweaks here and there.”
Lin unexpectedly held up another folded piece of paper. “Would you like to take this?”
In answer to her quizzical look, he said, “I was playing around with the spell for reading carbonized text the other night, and I accidentally made a new one. It’s sort of a rewind spell, in that it remakes the destroyed fragment of a text. You’d make better use of—”
Verda answered him with the hungriest kiss she’d ever given him. She launched herself off her chair, almost knocking him out of his. They’d started with her on his lap; soon, he’d pushed their things aside and was laying her gently on the table.
“Do you want to explore a little further tonight?” Lin murmured into the hollow of her throat. The skin there tingled – from a previous kiss, from the feel of his stubble, from anticipation.
“Here?” Verda’s brows knitted in apprehension, but her eyelids fluttered closed as she savored the sensation.
Lin’s mouth moved up her neck to the shell of her ear, his voice vibrating on her skin. “Why not? This room’s reserved just for us. No one’s coming to check, either – as long as you keep it down, anyway.”
Verda uttered a strangled noise of exasperation – and impatience. “Aren’t you confident?”
“I am,” Lin answered simply as he nibbled her earlobe. “After all, I’ve been studying you these last few weeks. So, what do you say?”
“Mm-hmm,” Verda whimpered between increasingly ragged breaths. One of Lin’s hands had slipped beneath the hem of her robe and was slowly tracing lazy circles up her inner thigh. Was he putting a spell on her? Oh, gods.
“What was that?” Lin asked mockingly into the spot where her neck met her ear. “You’ll have to enunciate, Snowflake, didn’t quite catch that.”
You brat. “Yes, you wretched tease, yes!” Verda gasped.
She felt him grin into her neck, right before his mouth trailed kisses downward and his fingers caressed her farther upward. “As you wish.”