PROLOGUE
WHEN KAROLJE BECAME king, he ordered rooms in the library to be mortared shut. Sometimes Anza imagined the insides of the rooms, dark, the books and papers ravaged by mice, the furniture and floors thick with the dust of those twelve years. Karolje had expelled most of the masters and locked nearly all the buildings. In the College now there were three masters and barely sixty students, who studied under the ever-watchful eyes of Karolje’s soldiers. The city had once had numerous printers and booksellers, most of whom had abandoned their shops or turned to some other business or been killed.
Moonlight silvery-blue on the square and the library made her hesitate. The white harpy droppings streaking the roof tiles were bright. Rumil bumped into her. Jance looked back and said, “Are you about to quit?”
“We aren’t going to be inconspicuous,” Anza said. They had all drunk too much raki, but she remembered to keep her voice down. It was after midnight, and the College required them to be in their rooms.
“I have the bloody key,” Jance said. “All we have to do is cross the square.”
“Shut up, both of you,” said Rumil. He was always nervous about breaking rules.
They did. It was fall, a crisp coolness in the air that the raki dispelled nicely internally and left pleasant on the skin. Jance walked forward, confident, arrogant. That was the trick, of course; if you looked like you were skulking, you were much more suspect.
No one stopped them. They walked up the steps to the library portico. It was too dark to see any of the carvings on the door. Jance said, “Don’t crowd me,” and Anza and Rumil backed up.
The key scraped against metal as Jance tried to fit it into the lock. Then came the snick and the turn. He pushed, and the door opened.
All three of them had been in the building before, usually sent on an errand by a master, but never at night. The moon shone through the high windows and left blocks of silver light on the threadbare carpet. The staircase ascending to the gallery loomed. To the left, the rooms where the permitted books were shelved were full of darkness.
Jance stepped in. Rumil said, “Now what? We know what it looks like. You’ve won the bet.”
“Afraid of ghosts?”
“It’s a library, not a mausoleum. You won’t be able to see a damn thing in there.”
“Leave, then. Are you coming with me, Anza?”
“I’m staying, but I’ll explore on my own,” she said. She glanced at Rumil. He shook his head and turned around, shutting the door as he left. With the door closed, the building was larger, darker, the moonlight catching on the rail of the stair faint and insufficient.
Jance said, “I knew he wouldn’t come in. I stole some other keys too. I’m going to try them in the north wing.”
“Give me one.” She held out her hand.
He placed a smaller key on her palm. “I don’t know what it unlocks,” he said. “It might belong with another building. Meet me back here in an hour.”
She put her foot on the stairs. Each step was loud, each creak an explosion.
The gallery, which circled the entrance hall, was lined with locked doors, former offices for the masters. She had walked past them in the daytime and seen the scars where the masters’ sigils had been forced off the doors. At either end a windowless staircase led up to the third floor, where the forbidden books were walled off. The bricks covered the doorways in tidy rows, solidly mortared, impossible to pass through.
Once she had asked her father why Karolje walled the books away instead of burning them, and he had said, Those were the early days. Before the war with Tazekhor ended, before the killings began, before the queen vanished. Mirantha had disappeared three years after her husband was crowned, and no one spoke of her. Her vanishing was one of the stories everyone knew and no one could remember hearing. The thought was disquieting in the darkness, the silence.
She went to the nearest room and tried the key.
It fit in the third door, but stiffly. She twisted harder. There was a horrific screech from the lock. The hinges were not much quieter when the door swung open.
The air flowing out was stale and musty. Dust lay on the floor like velvet. Books were stacked unevenly here and there, some leaning against each other, on mostly empty shelves. Where the moonlight hit them, the gilt on the spine was bright. A table had been shoved out of place, and one of the two chairs was on its side. Soldiers like her father had come, forced the master or student out, and locked the door. Any books that were illegal would have been confiscated. Anza was surprised the College had been allowed to keep the key.
Softly, as though the floor were fragile, she walked in. Clouds of dust raised by her footsteps showed in the moonbeams, wraithlike. The shadows of the lead bars on the window made a lattice in the silver light. When she stepped forward, the lattice fell across her legs, caging them.
Absurdly, she righted the chair. She went to the window to look out at the empty square. No movement, no shadows. Her breath fogged the cold glass. Jance’s taunt to Rumil suddenly seemed fitting. The library might have been a tomb, full of the dead and their uneasy shades.
She turned back to the room and saw that on one shelf the books were arranged neatly, carefully. They had not been searched by soldiers. She crossed and pulled the books off one at a time, opened them in the moonlight. Each had an owner’s mark on the first page, its details illegible in the faint light. A history she knew to be banned, printed before it had been illegal. Essays. Another history. A volume of poetry, small enough to fit comfortably in one hand. The poet, Mikos Rukovili, had been executed for treason years ago. A thick treatise of political philosophy. The evil of kings is that they obtain their power through plunder and reiving and maintain it with oppression. She returned it hastily to the shelf; knowledge of the contents alone could get her killed. A discourse on natural philosophy, illustrated with drawings in bold dark lines. A play.
How had they survived the king’s purge? Her tutor had had such books, and though he did not live in daily fear of king’s men in the small village, he had kept them hidden. When he taught her from them, he leashed his dog outside and locked the door. This is what Karegg is like now, he said, and she had understood that he was an exile. She had accepted the risk of learning with him, but she had never thought to find cracks in Karolje’s censorship within the College itself.
The book at the end of the shelf was thin and bound in a dark green leather, still relatively new. It fell open near the middle. She touched the corner of a page and felt the roughness of the pulp. The library scents of paper and leather and glue and dust bowed to a smell of orange blossoms and lavender and mint.
Moonlight revealed line after line of handwritten words marching across crisp pages in dark ink, written in the Eridian alphabet. Anza sounded out the first few words and realized that only the alphabet was Eridian, not the language. A protection against hasty glances or uneducated companions. Someone’s journal. There were no dates. She read a little further, then stopped at a word as fear clogged her throat. It was a name, a name she recognized. Her fingers trembled.
Her body screamed at her to run. She told herself she was not such a coward. She took several deep breaths, of the sort she had learned to take before she nocked an arrow to her bow. The journal had been kept, not destroyed. It mattered. If she did not take it now, it might not be seen for years, its voice further silenced. Someone had to read it.