The next day—after an eternity with the insufferable Briarbridge—Selena returned to her room and the trunk with her treasure inside. But the trunk was gone.
Panic consuming her, she imagined Charlotte confiscating the trunk and examining its contents elsewhere in the castle.
What really had happened was far more mundane, and she felt foolish for not thinking of it right away. One of the chambermaids must have unpacked for her, taking the dirty clothes to the launderer. Selena found her personal affects placed neatly on her dresser, including the burlap package.
She fought the piece of twine until finally defeating the knot. With a sharp intake of breath, she unwrapped the present to herself.
Selena picked up the book with reverence and held it out before her. The musty smell of ancient parchment made her nose twitch. She had fallen in love with that fragrance many years ago, and so, as she clutched the tome to her breast, she felt as though she were embracing an old friend. With her free hand, she reached for the packaging material, not wanting to leave behind any evidence of her adventures in smuggling.
She was considerably startled, then, by the presence of a second book.
Biting her lower lip, Selena looked from the book cradled in her arm to the one lying on her dresser. She recognized the one she was holding as the book Lydia had shown her, the one about Lyrend of Rend. But what was this other tome?
Selena set the first book beside the second. Both volumes were roughly the same shape and size, and the parcel had been bound tightly. That explained why she had not noted the stowaway.
She started to open the cover of the mystery book—and jerked her hand back at a loud crackle of electricity.
The shock had been only a little painful, but even in the daylight that filled her room, Selena had seen the thin blue arc of light jump from the book to her fingertip. And there was no metal visible anywhere on the book.
Cautiously, she touched the cover again. The spark did not return. She opened to the first page and did not immediately recognize the language. The author’s handwriting was comprised of exaggerated curves and lines that stretched beyond the bounds of a single line, causing characters to invade the words directly above and below them. The ink had grayed significantly. In some places, the writing was so light it had all but vanished from the page.
It did not take Selena long, however, to realize that the letters—distorted though they were—belonged to the Old Kings’ Speech. Her eyes darted back to the top of the page. After several minutes of deciphering the deplorable handwriting, she was able to translate the first sentence:
“The incantations contained in this tome were drafted by Gethen of Haun Vale during the reign of Emperor Zebulon.”
Selena stopped. Incantations? As in magic?
She supposed that Gethen might have been a priest of some kind, in which case “chants” or “songs” would have been as accurate a translation as “incantations.” She had never heard of Haun Vale, but Zebulon was a familiar name.
Zebulon had been the Emperor of Nebronem at the dawn of the Fourth Era, the beginning of the Enlightened Age. Selena knew almost nothing about the man, except he was the ancestor of Emperor Kespaar, who himself was one of the Three Wise Kings and the last to rule Nebronem before the Wars of Sundering swept Nebronem, Canth, and Vast Yehlorm from the face of Altaerra.
It stood to reason that Haun Vale had been located somewhere in that southeastern empire and that Gethen, whoever he might have been, was from Nebronem.
Little was known about Nebronem as a nation. The kingdom was almost always mentioned in the same breath as Canth and Yehlorm because of its involvement in the Three Kings War, which had pitted the men of Western Arabond against the elves of the East.
Delighted at the prospect of learning more about exotic Nebronem, Selena began flipping through the pages. She feared that she might find page after page of verse—songs in worship of whatever gods the clerics of Nebronem served—and was both frustrated and intrigued to find that every page beyond the first was written in a different language.
One she had never seen before.
The foreign runes looked simple enough to construct, but what struck her as odd was the disparity in the penmanship from page one to page two. Either someone other than Gethen had penned the introduction, or Gethen had been considerably more scrupulous in writing his god songs than composing the preface.
Selena turned page after page, scanning endless rows of the strange shapes that resembled no language she had ever seen. She was rewarded about halfway through the tome, when she discovered a passage written in the Old Kings’ Speech. She started translating the haphazard handwriting, hoping for a clue as to what the bulk of the book was about.
“The effects of this spell are woefully temporary. If a longer-lasting variation exists, I have never heard tell of it. I imagine such magic is carefully guarded, as the repercussions would stagger the mind.”
Selena frowned, glancing back at the words “spell” and “magic.” She knew she had translated them correctly because she had seen them crop up in many other books written in the Old Kings’ Speech.
Magic was a popular theme during this time period, and even the most accurate histories referred to it with as much seriousness as everything else. At their peak of power, Canth, Yehlorm, and Nebronem were said to be home to hundreds, if not thousands, of wizards. The Three Wise Kings themselves were purported to be spell-casters.
But Selena had always dismissed these details as flawed, the symptoms of a romantic-minded historian or a lazy archivist, who, not knowing how to treat the topic, copied the fantastic elements from an earlier source instead of getting to the truth.
There were people today who believed in magic and wizards. Selena scoffed at the notion. She was not even sure if she believed in Pintor and the rest of the pantheon, let alone hocus-pocus. She had never seen any evidence to support their existence.
Or had she?
With a vividness that caused the hairs on her neck to prickle, Selena recalled her encounter with Lydia Spade, how the coin purse had lain on the countertop one moment but reappeared back under her coat the next.
The runes on the open pages flashed with a blue light. Selena dropped the book with a gasp. On second look, they lost their radiance, but there was something uncanny about them nevertheless.
She slammed the cover shut, as though she might squish the offending words like so many spiders. Acting purely on impulse, she grabbed the book and buried it between the mattresses on her bed. The other book, the one she had bought for a few pieces of hair, remained on her dresser.
Her heart beat loudly in her breast. She did not want to be in the same room as the book of spells. Now was as good a time as any to go and see her grandmother. Even as she fled her bedroom, she knew she was being silly.
But as she rushed through the halls of Castle Nelesti, Selena could not banish Lydia’s beguiling grin from her mind.
I gave my hair to a witch, Selena thought. That cannot be good.