Bane, I will be FURIOUS if you crumple so much as a single page. That’s all we had in the Silver Cathedral—one page, and that’s considered an absolutely invaluable piece of history. The Librarians of Argent would sell their souls to you for a single line from one of these books.

“I already own all the souls I need,” I said with a chuckle, and Cirri surreptitiously nudged the ritual book out of my reach. “So you can read this? Or at least… some of it?”

She tapped the end of her pen, and wrote. I know twelve of the runes, since that’s all we had. The good news is that we already have what the Librarians referred to as a ‘parallel corpus’—a text in formal Veladari aligned with the existing High Tongue runes, so we could translate directly from our language to theirs. It’s called the Silversun Fragment, and it forms the basis of all our current working knowledge of the High Tongue.

What I would very much like to find within this is another Fragment-like parallel corpus, so we can add on to what we already know—so far, we’re aware that the runes tend to align somewhat with formal Veladari, to the point that it seems that one of the two languages was bastardized from the other, although I suspect the High Tongue came first. But we can’t simply assume that a similar alphabet implies direct translation. It would be like a modern-day speaker of Low-Country Nord trying to read the wyrd-runes; it’s mutated so strongly from its inception that it would read as gibberish. 

I blinked. And here I had thought that I might just… get lucky and mysteriously develop the ability to read it overnight. Clearly I had been out of my depth, and Cirri was a gift from the ancestors I hadn’t even known to look for.

“So we need to find one with an entry written in Veladari?” I picked up a scroll, and quickly put it back down at the sound of crackling paper and Cirri’s wince.

Not yet. First of all, I’m going to take inventory of everything here and note its condition. Some of these, such as that scroll you were just mauling about, are going to require a very delicate touch. Then I’ll go book by book and make any obvious notations on their origin or contents, and after that I’ll begin looking for another parallel corpus in these documents. It doesn’t necessarily need to be written in Veladari, so long as it’s comparable text.

“This is much more work than I believed it would be.” I frowned at the pile of books, wondering if perhaps I’d given Cirri an insurmountable task, rather than a gift… but she beamed at me, bright as the sun, her green eyes sparkling.

Important work, she wrote, underlining the first word. And I’ll love every minute of it. Thank you for trusting me with this, Bane. 

I reached out without thinking, brushing my fingers across her cheekbone and a silky curl of red hair. “Of course I trust you.”

My wife gazed up at me, and then leaned her head into my hand, resting her cheek on my palm and closing her eyes for a moment.

I savored those few seconds while they lasted, until she straightened and flipped to a fresh new page in her journal, writing Inventory at the top in her almost preternaturally-tidy handwriting.

She began with the first book, notating things I would never have considered beyond the contents: the wear on the binding, the material of the cover, even a small bloodstain on the title page. Even the gilded wreath of rose thorns embossed on the exterior made it into her notes, along with one pre-translated word in the title: the High Tongue rune for ‘blood’ was part of it.

I hovered around her, watching as she slowly but steadily examined the books one at a time. Cirri was in her own world, encased in a bubble of amber light, completely unaware of anything outside what was in front of her.

I knew perfectly well that I didn’t need to be here; if anything, my presence would only serve to distract her.

But I found myself sinking into a plush chair, entranced simply by watching her work. The gleam of her braid down her back, the careful movements of her hands, the way her lashes fluttered and cast shadows on her cheeks as she examined a book.

The only sound was the occasional scratch of her pen and her soft, even breathing. Soon I found that I could hear when she made a discovery exciting to her; her breathing would speed, ever so slightly, and the sound of her pen would become heavier and quicker.

Ancestors, I found myself jealous of the books. To be handled with such love and attention…

I thought that perhaps several hours had passed when Cirri finally sat up and stretched her back, shaking out her dominant hand. She smiled at me as she resettled herself, pulling her braid over her shoulder and rolling her shoulders before she picked up the next book.

She leaned forward, examining the cover, and then I saw it. A blooming red-and-violet stain on the nape of her neck, nearly hidden in the mass of her hair.

Without making a sound, I rose from the chair and prowled towards her, my eyes fixed on that one little mark. Such a small thing, in the grand scheme of things… but what, or who, had done it?

I pressed a thumb to the mark, measuring it, but I had not grabbed her by the throat. It was smaller than my thumbprint, but the angry violet color… it was fresh, and not done by my hand.

“What is this?”

Cirri had frozen under my touch, her pen still. There was a hesitation I might not have marked if I hadn’t come to know her a little better in the last few days, but she did hesitate before she turned back to the page we ‘talked’ on.

There was a knot in my hair, she wrote. I pulled it out a little too roughly. 

There were no snarled or torn hairs, nothing to indicate a tangle had been ripped out by force. It had the look of something that had gripped her, however small the patch.

So she was lying. But to protect herself… or someone else?

I didn’t choose to believe that my Cirri would lie to me without good reason. She’d had opportunities from the start to begin our sudden marriage with falsehoods; she’d chosen truth every time.

But if someone else had done this to her, it wouldn’t be allowed to persist. Besides myself, the only other people she had seen this morning were Koryek, who had greeted her politely and followed my orders to remain behind, and her personal maid from Argent… Elora? Elinor?

Whatever the girl’s name, she was a sour little thing. Wyn had already informed me that Yuli and Lissa, whom she’d selected as proper maids who might also teach Cirri about us, had been driven out by the new girl, who’d insisted on tending to the Lady alone.

So. I’d put cold, hard gold down that Elise had done this to Cirri. They had both been indentured servants of the Cathedral, according to Wyn’s dossier.

I would not have my wife subjected to the petty jealousy of a woman who could’ve returned to Argent at any time, but if Cirri was willing to lie for her… she didn’t want her to be hurt or dismissed.

The maid could work in the kitchens, then. Cook was always demanding more hands, especially when we housed human-heavy legions.

These thoughts passed in the blink of an eye; I caressed Cirri’s neck with a gentle touch. “It’s only a bruise. It’ll fade soon. Are you well enough here on your own? I must take care of some arrangements I’ve put off, as much as I’d prefer to watch you work.”

Cirri tilted her head up, no small amount of suspicion in her gaze, but she finally wrote, I’m completely at home here. This is going to take me all day, I don’t expect you to sit and watch me. But come find me for dinner, please? Sometimes I get caught up and forget everything else.

Despite the irritation and anger churning in my gut, I smiled at her. “Of course. I expect you to tell me about your day.”