Page 30 of House of Dusk

“Then the people who left those accounts are long gone to the labyrinth,” she said. “Most likely their spirits have been reborn a half-dozen times since. Surely it would do no harm to read them. I...I need this, Dolon. Please. There’s nowhere else I can go for answers.”

It wasn’t a lie. And it was more truth than she’d meant to give him. She felt suddenly naked as a bare root pulled from the dark earth.

A brief struggle contorted Dolon’s round face before he nodded. “I suppose...I suppose it’s a reasonable request. Come, I’ll show you where to find them.”

· · ·

Sephre had skimmed two dozen codexes in the past three hours, and each one felt like a violation. Some were tragedies of fate, but many more were the brutal, hideous acts of people. Swabbing her fingers over her weary eyes, she half expected them to come away bloody.

And yet she could not stop. She told herself it was because of Nilos, because she had to learn whether his taunts had any truth to them.

But she knew it was more personal than that.

She was looking for justification. Proof that she was no different than any of these long-dead folk who had been reborn in flame.

She squinted at cramped lines of faded ink, puzzled out archaic spelling, drowned herself in ancient pain, trying to measure it against her own.

Except that you couldn’t set your sorrows neatly onto a scale. There was no metric. How could she compare her own shames to that of a woman who accidentally poisoned her five children, mistaking dropwort for parsley?

Sephre closed the tormented mother’s codex and sat for a time, filling her lungs with the dry, cool air, tinged with the bitter scent of the pressed sheets of oilpith meant to protect the codexes from mildew and vermin. She was beginning to think this was a hopeless quest, on all counts.

Oilpith could only do so much. Many of the oldest were barely readable. If the Maiden—Faithful or Faithless—had left her story here, it might already be lost in a lacework of mice nibbles and blooms of mold.

Standing, she collected her current batch of codexes and returned them to the shelves. It was late afternoon by then, the shadows stretching. Carefully, she cupped a handful of flame in her left palm, kneeling to scan the lower recesses for any volumes she might have missed.

The flame wavered. Strange. She felt no breeze. Sephre swept her hand slowly, following a draft that only the fire seemed to feel, until she knelt beside the farthest niche.

Reaching into the shadows, she felt dust, slippery under her fingers. Then something more solid: a small oblong. She pulled it out.

A codex, barely larger than her palm. She traced the knot of twine twisted around the leather cover.

She’d worked out the meaning of the colors over the past hours.

It had been a small relief to discover she could skip over those tied in white thread.

Those belonged to children, and the two she’d skimmed before realizing the pattern had been devastating enough.

Sephre doubted that the Faithless Maiden had been Embraced as a child.

If there was some secret here, it belonged to the woman grown.

That left only the gray-knotted accounts of the criminals, and the handful of volumes bound in black. Testaments of adults who had sought the Embrace willingly. Like this one.

She tried to work the knot free, but the years had settled the cord like stone.

Carefully, she pressed one fingertip to the binding.

Not one of the traditional uses of the holy flame, but then, it was the flame that had guided her to this book.

A hum filled her chest as she tugged loose the singed cord.

Pages thin as onionskin fell open, and Sephre nearly dropped the codex to the floor.

The Serpent’s star sign stared up at her. Seven points, joined in a faceted ring, drawn carefully in black ink.

She searched the facing page for some explanation, but found the paper mottled with mold, barely legible. Only bits and pieces remained.

. . . knew what I had done when I took my vows, yet still calls me sister . . .

. . . the terrible cost of my betrayal . . .

. . . trusted one who loved me too well . . .

. . . could slay death itself, and break the cycle of . . .

. . . yet his mark lingers on my skin even now . . .

A paltry handful of clues, but enough to set her pulse jittering.

Was this it? The writer spoke of slaying death.

Was it a reference to the Ember King? The Faithful Maiden had given her lover that power, when she gave him the means to craft the dagger Letheko.

But the woman who left this account had clearly been an ashdancer.

She spoke of vows, of being called sister.

Sephre’s chest was a prison, locking her breath tight.

She had no word for what she was feeling.

Kinship? Was that it? For so long she had felt alone in her grief and shame.

But here, in these tattered pages, she saw it reflected.

A woman who had come to Stara Bron with some terrible weight on her soul.

She skimmed onward, fingers trembling so badly she tore one of the pages. There must be more. Every blotch of mold and bleary line of text taunted her, until she flipped to the last page in desperation.

It was almost completely illegible, only a few scattered words winking out like stars in the deep of night.

. . . Cerydon...request . . .

. . . blade...hidden . . . only agia...claim it . . .

. . . will ensure...never . . . again . . .

. . . faithless...no more . . .

A light scuff of approaching footsteps made her jump.

Instinctively, she tucked the small codex into her sleeve, just as Brother Dolon appeared at the end of the shelf.

He hovered there, averting his eyes from the shelves that held the secrets of the man he had once been.

“Did you find what you were looking for, sister?”

Her heart thudded. Foolish to let the ancient, mold-riddled text turn her into some sort of sneak-thief. But even more foolish to ignore the truth simply because she didn’t care for the messenger.

“Most of these old codexes are unreadable,” she answered, hoping he wouldn’t notice the evasion.

She didn’t want to lie to Dolon. But the words in the codex—scattered and shattered as they were—had done nothing to cast doubt on Nilos’s accusations.

Instead, they had given shape and form to Halimede’s ghosts.

To the oath sworn all those years ago by Agia Cerydon, and passed on to each of the agias after them.

A woman who called herself faithless had come here, to Stara Bron. She had taken the Embrace, cleansing herself of some deep shame. But before the flames took her past, she had given her agia a blade to keep hidden, so it could never be used again. It must be Letheko.

And now King Hierax’s son was on his way to Stara Bron, guided by the words of a prophecy, to claim it.

She needed to speak with Halimede. Fates, let her wake. I need her more than ever.

“I’d best get back to the garden,” she said, starting to move past Dolon. “Thank you, brother.”

He held up an arm, staying her. “Of course, sister. But the garden will need to wait. Sister Beroe has called an assembly.”

Wonderful. The last thing she needed right now was another tedious summations meeting, especially one led by “Acting Agia” Beroe.

But summations was always early in the morning, directly after dawn prayer. Not late in the afternoon, with the sun slanting toward dusk. And she could think of no other reason to gather all the ashdancers except—

“It’s the royal party,” said Dolon. “They’ve arrived.”