I’m not trying to ruin you. You’re right, we are the same, and I don’t want to be waited on. If you want to stay here in a good position, then just pretend you’re dressing me. I won’t tell you if you don’t. But I don’t want your help. 

I tapped it forcefully and waited for Ellena to read it. She looked up at me, mouth twisted with suspicion, but finally relented and dropped the brush in my hands. “Fine.”

I exhaled in relief as she took the stairs back up to the garret, and finished my hair myself. That was almost too easy, but anything was better than having her breathe down my neck, mocking me with every word.

My skin still stung where she’d pinched me, and I settled for a loose, fluffy braid down my back to hide the redness. I folded over the page in the journal so Bane wouldn’t inadvertently see it, tucked it in my leather bag, and balanced my pen behind my ear.

He was waiting patiently in the hall when I emerged, and I managed to smile.

“I’m going to draw out the suspense, and have you eat first,” he said, offering me his arm.

You’re a cruel man, I told him, and leaned into him, looping my arm through his.

Despite my misgivings at being given even more things I’d done nothing but marry him to earn, I ate quickly, my curiosity now an inferno about what he wanted to show me.

He wasn’t hiding his own eagerness well. His foot bounced under the table, and he had to stop his fingers from drumming on the table. I raised a brow the third time I heard the tak tak of claws on wood, and Bane self-consciously curled his hand towards himself.

Don’t be shy, I teased him, eating the last bite of honeyed bread on my plate. Show me what it is!

He stood, nearly knocking over his chair, and produced a length of silk from the pocket of his shirt. “You’ve got to keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them.”

I stared at the silk. Are you going to blindfold me?

He probably didn’t know the word, but it was self-explanatory: my fingers flattened and dragged over my eyes. Bane hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

Do what you must do, then. The suspense will kill me soon. I turned around, and felt the heat of him against my back as he lowered the soft fabric over my face. I closed my eyes under them obediently as he tied a big bow in the back, and reached out for his hands.

Claws met my fingers, and Bane led me out of the dining room.

I tried to map the keep as we walked: he went right first, towards the Tower of Winter. Was it something in his room?

And then he nudged me right again, then left. We must’ve been on the left side of the keep, between the Winter and Autumn towers, a place I hadn’t explored yet.

So I turned to my other senses; I smelled Bane’s scent first and foremost, wood and smoke, and beneath that, beeswax and wood polish. It was quiet, my footsteps the only sound; Bane’s feet were silent.

He paused, and I heard a door opening; even with the dark silk over my eyes, my eyelids turned red from the brilliance of a thousand candles.

“I listened to what you wrote,” he said, his voice suddenly gruff and apprehensive as he led me forward a few steps. “You know six languages, and you were going to be a Librarian.”

When my feet met plush carpet, my heart started thumping unevenly, a burst of excitement jolting my stomach.

There was a scent in the air here, unmistakable and beloved.

“We have no Librarian here, not since the last Scrollkeeper was killed. I cannot give you what the Cathedral could, but… this is what I can give you. There are many things you could learn. Things I’m hoping you learn, as they’ve been lost to us for centuries. You might not love my kind, but the things you could do for them with your knowledge… we would be eternally grateful.”

Please, for the love of the Light, let me take the blindfold off, I begged, and Bane took my hands again, halting my words.

“I’m not asking you to put aside your own studies and desires. But I thought, if you were hoping to learn more, I could do this one thing to help. To help both of us.”

Did he feel my pulse racing? His fingertips were pressed to the underside of my wrists, where he surely felt the galloping beat.

I heard him inhale, and squeezed his fingers as tightly as I could.

“All right. You can take it off now.”

My hands were trembling as I tore off the blindfold, blinking in the burst of brilliant amber light, frozen in wonder.

The scent of books permeated the air, the library a beautiful three stories of shelves stretching to the arched ceiling; I took in the multitude of spines in a blur, a hand over my mouth.

He thought it wasn’t enough? That the Cathedral of Silver could do better?

No. This was a treasure trove. This was the gold in a dragon’s hoard.

I tried to sign to him, but my thoughts were spinning and nothing cohesive formed. By the Light, I could spend three centuries here, and still have another three left before I finished everything.

“From what you told me of your studies, I had an old project of mine brought out for you.” Bane took one of my fluttering hands and led me forward, to a broad polished table with several books laid out, and a small pile of half-burned scrolls. “None of us speak or read this now. I gave up attempting any translation years ago; I don’t have the mind for languages, and Wyn is too involved in other studies to make the effort. But the treasury of this keep contained these remnants from the old empire. They’re damaged, and there’s not much left, but they’re yours now.”

My lungs stopped working entirely. I reached out to touch the cover of the topmost book, my hands shaking violently.

It was bound in red leather, much like my journal, but the gilt inlay of the title almost resembled runes, spiny and yet delicate, the High Tongue of the vampires.

In the Cathedral library, we’d had a single document, mostly destroyed by water; this was beyond treasure. In these few books was an entire lost world, a culture drowned in blood and fire and sent below, a forgotten history.

There were no words for it.

I drew in a breath, then another, fighting back tears. To think that if I hadn’t been the first to answer the Eldest’s call that fateful morning… I would not have Bane.

I would not have a trove of the most rare and extinct language in the world to unravel.

Never would I have found my heart’s desires.

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Chapter 18 Bane

My wife signed something to me, stopped, then tried to sign something else. She moved rapidly, so excited she kept cutting herself off—a stilling of the hands, followed by pressing them to her mouth, then attempting to sign again before they devolved back into excited flutters.

Finally, I had given her something that made her speechless.

With trepidation igniting into victory—and perhaps some small amount of smugness—I pulled the topmost book from the pile, opening it to reveal pages charred at the edges, the parchment scorched to a mellow golden tone.

But the ink was still legible, and that was what mattered. “I believe this one was about spiritual and holiday rituals… possibly used by the high priests of the royal line. I’ll be honest, I never made it that far into the translations, but it was recovered from a Bloodgarden altar. What else would they have stored there?”

Cirri started, giving me a scandalized look as I turned a rather crispy page, and then she reached out and gently took it from my hands.

She laid it on the table, cradling the book like it was an infant rather than an inanimate object, signing to me sternly. After a moment she yanked her journal from her bag, plucked the pen from behind her ear, and began writing under this morning’s conversation.