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“If you liked the bacon and lentil soup, I can bring you more for dinner.” Calleigh Dell put the empty dishes in her basket and set it out in the hall.
“Thank you, that would be nice,” said Stasya. She had been in the room for three days, all alone except when Miss Dell came by to bring her food and, once a day, to examine her for the marks of the plague. Fortunately, though not surprisingly, none had appeared.
Stasya was starting to wonder just how long the duke and his advisor, Alwin Garnett, were going to keep the hillichmagnars locked up. When she asked Calleigh, the woman stuttered a bit and wandered indecisively between the door and the window and back again. “Oh, we both know you haven’t got the plague,” she finally said, and with that, she reached up and pulled her mask off.
Calleigh had a long, pale, slender face covered in freckles, and fiery red hair. She barely looked much older than Stasya herself, and she seemed awfully young to be the assistant of a man so apparently important as this Garnett person. When Stasya asked, however, Calleigh revealed that she was 28, and had been traveling with “the great physician” for ten years. She blushed when she said this, and Stasya got the distinct feeling that Calleigh was more than merely an assistant for the man.
She certainly knew her herblore, though. She showed Stasya the inside of the mask and talked about which plants were used in the sachet that fit into the long, pointed beak. There were cloves of garlic, wild carrot, essence of lavender (to help disguise the smell of the garlic), and one final ingredient. “Pearlwort. That’s what they call it here in Leornian, anyway, though other people call it—”
“Mothan,” said Stasya. The two women smiled at each other.
“Listen, I’m really not supposed to let you out yet,” said Calleigh. “But to tell you the truth, the young man hillichmagnar who was with you, Lord Ellard, has been using magy to go between his room and the duke’s library and archive for two days now. I saw him in there, but I didn’t tell anyone. If you wanted to do the same thing, I promise I won’t say anything.”
A library sounded a good deal more interesting than sitting in this little room for another day. And the possibility of meeting Ellard again was intriguing, too. The more Stasya thought about the lecture she had gotten from Caedmon, the more she started to think that there must have been a reason why the great hillichmagnar had bothered to warn her away from Ellard. Perhaps Caedmon knew something she did not. Perhaps Caedmon knew that Ellard was attracted to her. And while she didn’t want to give Ellard undue encouragement, and she didn’t want their friendship to go too far, the idea that he might feel desire for her couldn’t help but make him seem more desirable.
Stasya knew the spell Ellard must have used to get out of his room and go to the library: ikke bewege. It allowed a hillichmagnar to disappear in one place and instantly reappear in another place. How far you could move depended a great deal on how powerful you were. At least that was the theory. Stasya had only read about it; she had never tried it.
“Um, where is the library?” she asked.
Calleigh pointed vaguely up and to her right. Then she frowned thoughtfully and pointed down, instead. “It’s about a hundred feet that way. More or less. Maybe two hundred.”
One or two hundred feet “more or less.” Two hundred feet with lots of thick, stone walls in the way. Stasya imagined what it would be like if she got the distance wrong and ended up materializing in the middle of solid granite. What exactly would happen? The books hadn’t mentioned that, though they had suggested that it was best to practice the spell in an open space, preferably outdoors. This was really not the time to be trying such a dangerous spell for the first time.
“If it’s all the same to you,” she whispered, “could you leave the door open and tell the guards to go take a break? I promise I’ll come back when I’m done.”
Calleigh smiled. “Actually, the guards haven’t been there for two days now. It’s just been me.” She stepped out into the corridor, checked to see no one was coming, and beckoned Stasya out. “If you get caught, though, say that you used magy to escape. Please?”
When Stasya had agreed to this condition, Calleigh gave her directions to the library and wished her luck before scurrying off in the other direction.
Stasya crept down the stairs, passed through a narrow arch, and tiptoed along a gallery above a dark chamber full of armor. Sometimes she could hear voices echoing up stairs or along corridors, but she never saw anyone. She supposed this part of the palace was old and disused. Or perhaps these were the public rooms, where parties and receptions were held. Perhaps now, in the midst of the plague, so few people were allowed to come or go from the castle that these rooms were no longer needed. But even here, the floors had been spread with fresh rushes and washed with vinegar. The windows had been sealed with wax, so the air was stifling. Down a flight of wide, sweeping stairs, she found a doorway with a statue of a tall, elegant woman with a crown. The door was locked, but that, at least, was a spell Stasya could remember, and in less than a second, she was in the library.
It was less a library than a labyrinth. There were stairs and ladders up to half-hidden balconies. There were tiny doors that led to high-pillared halls, and wide gateways that led nowhere in particular. Many of the shelves were empty, which puzzled Stasya for a minute until she realized that many of the duke’s books had probably been moved to the University Library long ago. What were left, in many cases, seemed to be stacks of records and account books. Stasya looked at one set and found she couldn’t even read them. They might have been written in Old Trahernian—the language of magy spells—but she couldn’t be sure.
Farther in, the shelves were dustier and warped with the weight of the books and papers. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to the organization of the place. One stack of what appeared to be blueprints for a church were crammed half in, half out of a bureau drawer. It looked very much to Stasya as if people had been coming in these rooms for centuries, sticking books or papers wherever they could fit, and then leaving again. It seemed in some of the rooms as if no one had ever come back to look at the records after they had been put into storage.
“Don’t they have a librarian?” she wondered. When studying with Evika, she had visited many great archives, including the University Library here in Leornian. She had developed a great respect for the men and women who dedicated themselves to imposing order on ancient records and manuscripts. It was a little odd that someone as rich and powerful as the Duke of Leornian wasn’t able to employ someone to do that for him. The thought occurred to her that the archivist might have died of the plague, but that didn’t seem right. The neglect had clearly been going on longer than one year.
She was just starting to wonder where Ellard might be, when she heard him call to her. “Stasya. I could feel your magy getting closer.”
Looking around, she saw him in a small room off a side gallery with a little red book in his hands. When she joined him, it was clear that this was where he had been spending his time the past two days. The dust had been cleared from the shelves, and he had organized a number of the papers into new piles. “What’s all this?” she asked.
“Evidence of my odd compulsions,” he said, setting the book aside. “I hate to see things out of order. As far as I can tell, these are warrants of commission that were issued by the King of Leornian during one of our glorious wars to subdue the people of the Wislicbeorgs.” He tapped the top sheet on one of the piles. “This one was for Harald Huldassen. He was Freagast before Astrid, if you didn’t know.” He smiled at her, and when his black eyes met hers, she couldn’t think of a thing to say. She probably couldn’t have remembered her own name if he asked.
Finally she managed an, “Amazing,” and forced herself to look at the ancient parchment and not at him. He was inches away from her, and when he reached over to show her a different warrant, his hands brushed against her arm. She shivered and, in order to change the subject, she pointed at the red book and asked what it was.
“This old thing?” smirked Ellard. “This is a pretty interesting book. It was written by Harald, in fact. There’s a section in here about Leofe.”
“The woman who wrote the Halig Leoth,” Stasya said.
“Yes. You get the sense, reading history, that she was a quiet, devout sort of woman. Harald tells a very different story.” Ellard set down the book and put his hand on Stasya’s. “From the way Harald writes about her, she reminds me a bit of you.”
Her legs felt a little weak. She could feel the rational part of her mind starting to shut down whenever he spoke. “What am I doing?” she thought. “We’re looking at dusty documents. If Caedmon hadn’t said anything, I would never have thought there was anything untoward in the way he’s looking at me, or the way he’s touching me.”
“You know,” Ellard said, “we never got a chance to finish your Wiga lesson.”
“Caedmon seemed to think it wasn’t a good idea.”
“Caedmon doesn’t need to know.”
She pointed at the shelves on either side of them. “There’s not much room in here.”
“There is room enough,” he said, “provided you move slowly. There’s a saying in your country about that, isn’t there? ‘Ride slower, and you’ll get farther’?”
“Yes, my mother used to say that.”
“Then you should mind your mother. Get in your stance for the Falcon forms.”
She turned away from him and bent her knees, right leg slightly forward. She extended her arms for the first form and waited. And sure enough, a few seconds later, she felt his hands on her hips. “Good,” he said. “You remember.” His hands pushed her gently into the second pose, and then the third, and the next, and the next. She could feel his breath against her neck when she reached back at the end of the form.
“That’s not bad,” he whispered, “but your arm needs to be farther out.” Slowly, he ran his own hand down her arm. Then he intertwined his fingers with hers and gently pulled her arm straighter. “That’s it.”
She turned her head so that she could see him out of the corner of her eye. “Should we move on to the second form, then?”
“I think we still have work to do on this one,” he said. Then he leaned forward, wrapping his arms around her, and he kissed her.
On the high plains, whenever the clan spotted a tornado or a grass fire or a mountain lion among the herd, it was the job of the clan chief’s herald to take up her horn and blow the warning signal. This was different for every clan, of course, and the specific pattern of notes was something that young Loshadnarodski children learned almost before they could walk. Now, in the library, with Ellard’s lips locked to hers, there was some part of her mind that could almost hear her old clan signal, telling her that she was in deadly peril.
“This is a bad idea,” she told herself. “I really ought to leave. I don’t know why I came here.” But every minute she was there, she became surer of why she had come to the library. She had been looking for Ellard. And now she had found him. And some new part of her mind was now telling her that there was nothing at all to be afraid of. This was Caedmon’s student. He had a high purpose and a noble future. She could trust him, couldn’t she? Surely, yes.
Before she had even come to that conclusion, though, he was reaching down the front of her tunic. His hand was softer than she had expected, but very strong. He pulled and pinched at her in a way that she found terribly uncomfortable, and yet she couldn’t quite bring herself to ask him to stop it. In fact, when he moved his hand down and began running it over her stomach, she grabbed it and moved it back up to her chest. He laughed and said, “Now, now, Stasya. Mustn’t rush things.”
She tried to turn around so that she could face him directly, but he slipped away and came up behind her again. In one, quick movement, he untied her laces, and then she felt his hand begin to slide down into her trousers. She knew that this was the last moment when she could make herself stop him. She could push him away or run out of the room. He was standing behind her; there was nothing in her way. But she didn’t want to escape from him at all. She didn’t want him to take his hand away and stop doing what he had just started to do.
Stasya’s sexual experiences so far had been so abortive and so unsatisfactory that at first she was confused by what was happening. He seemed too forceful, too insistent. And then something changed, and her breath started to come faster, and she thought, “Ah, so this is why people do this.”
It occurred to her that she was breathing awfully hard now, and she caught herself letting out little moans of pleasure now and again. But even when she raised her arm and bit the sleeve of her tunic in an attempt to keep herself quiet, she couldn’t stop.
Then his hand stopped moving. “What? Keep going,” she demanded. She felt as if she was standing at the top of a high mountain, looking down into a rich green valley. And she knew that all it would take would be one more, tiny nudge, and she could get there.
He drew his hand out of her trousers and said softly, “There is someone else in here.”
“Then let’s go somewhere else.” She grabbed his hand and tried to put it back between her thighs, but he pulled away easily. She grabbed for the laces at the front of his trousers, but he dodged away, laughing, and then patted her on the head, as if she were a child.
“You need to learn self-control,” he said. Then, without another word, he vanished.
Stasya slumped back against the table, breathing hard and trying to decide if she ought to go find somewhere to take a very cold bath, or if she should try to do for herself what Ellard had done for her. She had just decided upon the latter, and was about to put her hand down her trousers, when she heard footsteps, and Caedmon poked his head in the door. “Oh, hello, Stasya,” he said. “Was Ellard here?”