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I sat at a table in the library, in front of the large stained glass window, the different colors and designs capturing my attention. The darkness falling over the sun, the hag and her cauldron, the wolves, and the girl trying to escape the trees. All such disjointed images that didn’t seem to belong together.
Yet, my mind was elsewhere.
Again, I was trying to forget, pushing all thoughts aside while I focused on my breathing.
A cry of pain echoed around me. I blinked and glanced around, searching for its source, but I was alone, surrounded only by books and empty tables. Bogdana’s death haunted me. Her pleas, her whimpers, rang in my ears as I tried to sleep each night. She’d been a wife, and I’d killed her. she’d been a mother, and I drained all her blood.
I placed three fingers on each temple and, pressing hard, massaged them in circles. A headache pounded behind my right eye.
The ledger before me was an excuse to make it appear as if I were researching possible leads on a Trove. But in reality, the library had become my refuge. No one visited it, and only Loretta walked the aisles as she rearranged books for no apparent reason.
It had been four days since my second feeding. Guilt lashed at me every second of the day, tearing at my skin and leaving me raw.
More than once, I’d thought of taking my life, but some misguided instinct of preservation kept me from harming myself. I told myself Bogdana hadn’t died in vain, that every step I took—no matter how cruel and monstrous—brought me closer to destroying the sick way of life imposed on our city.
I glanced at the ledger, skimming the names of captured Troves.
Time passed. There was a clock on the wall that ticked and ticked and ticked. The sound of steps pulled me back to the surface. Almost an hour had passed, and I had barely moved. Had I breathed? Had my heart beaten? Ever since Bogdana, I’d started to imagine my insides slowly turning to rock.
Loretta walked next to me, carrying a few tomes in her arms. She nodded in greeting and began sliding the books into a shelf in the far corner. I watched her for a distraction. Her hands moved confidently, the way they did in the infirmary when she tended her patients. Her back was straight, her posture that of someone who carried herself with dignity.
She slid the last book into position but didn’t push it all the way in. Its spine didn’t line up with the others. Tenderly, she caressed the book, then disappeared through a side door without a backward glance.
Something drove me out of my stupor and, before I realized it, I was standing in front of the book, peering up at it. The spine was familiar. Eagerly, I pulled the book down from the shelf and leafed through it until I found it.
Florea’s story.
This was one of the books Loretta had given me to read after I injured my leg during my challenge against Skender. The girl’s story had captured my imagination, but it had been incomplete and left me wanting more.
Slowly, I set the book on the nearest table and sat. I skipped forward several pages, remembering how Florea hated being locked in her bedroom every night while her parents worked late hours tending their inn, and how she yearned to know why some nights their world turned as silent as a graveyard. What secret were her parents keeping from her? I’d been left as curious as Florea herself.
Now, as I turned the last few pages I’d read nearly four months ago, I had a distinct suspicion that, this time, they wouldn’t be missing. Somehow I knew they would be there, waiting for me to read them as if they’d been left out on purpose. And, indeed, I was right.
Loretta had brought me the rest of the story.