Stablehands appeared, hesitating at the sight of mercenaries. Before Savedra could identify herself the great doors swung open and the familiar gaunt form of the house steward descended the steps. Savedra smiled and stepped forward, trying in vain to shake the wrinkles from her heavy skirts. As a child she would have run to him, but dignity and her still stiff leg kept her from it now.
Iancu Sala blinked when he saw her, surprise foreign on his creased aquiline face. “Vedra!” He hurried to embrace her, stooping to do so. “I had no word you were coming. Is everything well?”
“I’m fine, Iancu. It’s—It’s complicated.” She smiled wryly.
“Ah.” He brightened, straightening his immaculate jacket. Any Severoi vassal was well versed in complications. He gestured the stablehands forward, and sent another servant to prepare rooms and extra portions for dinner. Cahal led the other riders toward the stable, while
Ashlin fell in beside Savedra. If Iancu thought a mercenary out of place in the family house, he gave no sign.
“How is the archa, and your father?” Iancu asked as he took their cloaks. He poured an ewer of lavender-scented water into a basin by the door and let them wash the dust and sweat from their faces. The hall always smelled of lavender and wood polish and wax.
“They’re well. They would send greetings, if they weren’t pretending to ignore this trip.” They followed him into a parlor, where Savedra sank into a chair and nearly moaned with pleasure at a seat that didn’t move. Ashlin paced behind her, maneuvering her sword carefully around the furniture.
Iancu’s heavy brows arched, but he only moved to the sideboard to pour plum brandy.
“Sit down,” Savedra told Ashlin. “My feet ache just watching you.”
“You need to stretch too, or you’ll regret it in the morning.” In compromise, she leaned against the arm of a couch, angling her sword aside.
“Excuse my manners,” Savedra said, accepting a glass from Iancu. “Iancu Sala, steward of Evharis, this is—”
A heartbeat’s pause while she scrambled for a suitable name, but Ashlin filled it by standing and bowing gracefully. “Sorcha Donelan, King’s Talon and Captain of the Royal Guard.” Her lilting accent, faded after years in Erisín, came to the fore. “At your service and that of your house.”
Iancu’s eyebrows climbed higher, but he returned the bow with all due dignity. “The hospitality of Evharis is yours, Captain. You’re a long way from home.”
“Farther every day, it seems. But it’s my honor to escort the Lady Savedra wherever she goes.”
Savedra realized she was gaping, and took a gulp of brandy to cover it. Liquor seared her throat and sinuses and brought tears to her eyes. Ashlin sipped her own drink, lips twitching with amusement.
Iancu’s dark eyes flickered as he studied them both, but it took more than aliases and disguises to dent his discretion. “Dinner will be late, I’m afraid. Many of the staff are helping with the pomegranate harvest, and we didn’t expect guests.”
“That’s all right,” Savedra said, even as the brandy lined her empty stomach with heat. “We came to use the library. May we?” Asking permission was merely a courtesy, but Nadesda had trained her in politeness as well as poisons.
“Of course,” Iancu replied in kind, collecting their empty glasses and returning them to the tray.
He led them through the back of the house, pointing out useful rooms and stairs to Ashlin as they passed. It wasn’t the grand tour, but still meant to impress—the route took them through the great family room, lined with paintings and statues and costly heirlooms. Ashlin made appropriately admiring noises. The rear doors opened onto the columned porch and into the gardens. The space behind the house had been carved out of the hillside, and above the high walls a dark slope of trees brooded. It unnerved some of her cousins, but Savedra had always found the forest’s weight reassuring.
Beyond the garden’s lavender-lined paths and trellised arches rose the library, imported red sandstone glowing incarnadine in the dying light. High windows shone amid the intricate redents. The main house was arched and columned and sprawling in classical Selafaïn tradition, but
the library had been built years later as a wedding gift by an archon for his southern bride, crowned with ogival lotus-shaped towers in the ancient Sindhaïn style.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” Iancu said as they climbed the broad red steps. “No one has visited the library in months, since Lord Varis and his friend were here. Your generation has no sense of history.”
An old jibe, long become a joke, but Savedra didn’t rise to it this time. “When was Uncle Varis here?” she asked instead, trying to keep the sharp interest from her voice.
“Four months ago, it must have been. At the end of Janus. He came without warning as well—clearly he has been a bad influence on you after all.”
“And which
friend
did he bring?” She used the same carefully bland inflection he had.
“I don’t know.” He paused at the top of the steps to sort through his keys, and the playfulness drained slowly from his voice. “She was hooded and cloaked the whole time, and offered no name. We’re all used to Lord Varis’s assignations, of course, but this one… I didn’t like her. She was a witch, I think. Not one of your Arcanost scholars, but a proper
vrajitora
. I even thought I heard a bit of the eastern mountains in her voice.”
Iancu’s parents had crossed the mountains from Sarkany decades ago, and not survived long after settling in Arachne. Their orphaned son had eventually been adopted by a housekeeper at Evharis and risen high in the family’s confidences, but the wild lands east of the Varagas were in his blood. He’d kept Savedra up at night with stories of hungry wolves and bloodthirsty spirits and great smoldering wyrms who laired in the mountains by the Zaratan Sea. But there was no hint of exaggeration in his tone now.
Savedra’s stomach chilled. “Do you remember what they looked at? I need to see it.”
Iancu frowned as the brassbound door swung open. “I do. But you put me in an awkward position, milady. Lord Varis didn’t swear me to secrecy, but no member of this family should ever have to. Gossip is one thing, but it isn’t my place to betray a confidence, intentional or otherwise.”
Savedra pressed her tongue between her teeth, biting back a hasty reply. Only her mother might blithely order Iancu in matters such as this. Even if Ashlin revealed herself, the word of an Alexios, princess or not, meant nothing to the steward of Evharis. There were already Severoi who thought Savedra a traitor to the House, though Nadesda’s approbation kept their tongues in check.
The last rind of sun slipped behind the mountains, and the light cooled and greyed. Somewhere in the garden a cricket began a slow droning chirp.
“Forgive me,” Iancu said, holding the door for them. “It’s not my place to keep guests standing on the front step, either.”
They moved past him into the cool gloom of the library. Light from the high windows cast diffuse streaks across the polished tiles. The steward took a match from a table by the door and struck it—not to ignite a lamp, but a spell. The flame died quickly, but light kindled in a glass globe set on the wall, then in another, spiraling upward one by one until their pale gold glow filled the tower. An extravagant sort of magic, and one that required renewing every month, but it meant that no candle or oil lamp ever endangered the library’s collection.
Savedra was familiar with the royal palace’s library, and had seen the one in the Arcanost, and knew that both
collections dwarfed this one. But the sight of the shelves lining the walls never failed to impress her. A wide marble stair spiraled around the room, its landings positioned under the windows where tables and chairs might catch the best light. Pointed arches led to the smaller domes that budded from the sides of the tower—the bindery, secure vaults, and the librarian’s rooms. The last librarian had retired over a year ago, half-blind and rheumatic, and the family had yet to appoint another. Iancu had taken up the duties, as he did with any left lying unfulfilled.
Savedra turned back to Iancu, who lingered by the door, obviously preparing to excuse himself. “Can you tell me this, at least? Varis was researching the vrykoloi, wasn’t he? Demons and blood magic and their history in Erisín? The sorts of thing an eastern witch might be interested in.”
The last was a blind strike, hastily cobbled together from Iancu’s old bedtime stories; she didn’t expect it to hit home. But he flinched, left hand rising in a warding gesture before he clenched it at his side again.
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” he said. “And you should be careful what you speak aloud, especially so near the mountains. But if you wish to research such things, the index is all you need.” He bowed shallowly. “If you’ll excuse me, I must see to your men, and to dinner. It should be ready within the hour.” He hesitated for a heartbeat as he turned, then squared his shoulders and stepped into the gathering dusk. The door echoed shut behind him.
The books were missing.
Savedra and Ashlin searched for an hour before they were certain of it—not misshelved, or set aside, but gone
from the building. Demonologies, treatises on blood magic, certain family histories, and those were only the most obvious. Checking the entire catalog was a task for more than two people and one evening.
Iancu returned just after the hour to call them to dinner, but when Savedra explained the problem he immediately joined the search. Books were not removed from the library, not even by archons, and none had been stolen in living memory. Another hour passed, revealing at least two more missing volumes, and night had settled thick and heavy against the windows. Finally Iancu collapsed in a chair, slumping with a despair Savedra had never seen in him before.
“I can’t believe it,” he muttered against his hands. “Not of Lord Varis.”
Savedra could hardly believe it herself. Varis respected little, certainly, but of the things he did, she would have ranked knowledge and her mother among the very highest.
“I understand this is an unpleasant situation,” Savedra said, kneeling beside him, “and I have no desire to make it worse. But please, will you tell me everything you know about Varis’s visit? It’s important.”
He gave her a wan smile and brushed her hair lightly as he had when she was a child. “I shouldn’t, but I will. After dinner, though, or the cooks will be even more annoyed with us.”
Dinner was duck in pomegranate sauce with tabouli, delicious even cold, but they ate in frowning silence. Even a good bottle of Ombrian siyah did nothing to lighten the mood, though Savedra was enamored enough of the vintage that she took another bottle with them when they retired to Iancu’s private study.
“I’m afraid there isn’t much I can tell you,” the steward said, after activating the room’s silence. “Lord Varis came, as I said, in Janus. He was quieter than usual, perhaps, more withdrawn. I thought that had to do with his companion, since she took such care to hide her face.”
“Do you have any idea who she was?”
“None, though of course everyone speculated. Some thought she was just a melodramatic actress, while others decided she must be a member of a great house, one who couldn’t be seen associating with a Severos. The kitchen staff had a wager going as to whose wife she might be.”
“Did you speak with her?”
“Hardly at all. She was never rude, but she rarely spoke, and even more rarely to anyone but Varis. He was… solicitous of her privacy.”
“But you didn’t like her.”
“No.” He shook his head, pinching the long arch of his nose. “I knew it was foolish even then, but something about her made me uneasy. You think me superstitious, and perhaps that’s so, but between her accent and the nature of her studies I thought her a witch from the mountains. Not all magic is as civilized as it is in Erisín.”
“And you never heard a name?”
Iancu pinched his nose again, as if against a headache. “He called her
my lady
, and
darling
, but he calls the gardeners
darling
, so that hardly signifies. And once…” The lines on his brow deepened in thought, and Savedra was disconcerted by how old it made him look. He ought to be as timeless as the house. “I thought I heard him call her Phaedra once, or say the name. She didn’t respond to it, though, so I wasn’t certain. And it’s hardly an eastern name. I suppose I didn’t expect it to be hers.”
It was Savedra’s turn to frown, turning her wine glass between her palms and searching for answers in the dark ripple. “I’ve heard that name recently.” It was a perfectly normal Selafaïn name, though not one that had been in fashion lately, so where… “Phaedra Severos. She wrote an essay on blood magic. I saw it mentioned in the Phoenix Codex.”
“I don’t know of any Phaedra Severos,” Iancu said. From the steward of Evharis, it was practically a denial of her existence. “When was this essay published?”
She shrugged. “Four sixty something. Before I was born.”
“No sense of history,” he muttered with a fleeting smile. He set aside his glass and rose, unfolding long limbs from his chair. He removed a copy of the Codex from his great oaken desk and handed it to Savedra. “Where did you see the reference?”
After several moments of flipping and squinting and muttering imprecations, she finally found the footnote she remembered. “ ‘On The Transfer of Magic and Consciousness via the Sanguine Humor,’ by Phaedra Severos. Published by the Arcanost in 463.”