The Reader (27 page)

She shivered, delighted, as the words began to form images in the mist. Fence posts. The indistinct shadows of barrels and wheelbarrows. She imagined dew-dampened grass batting at her shoes and the legs of her trousers.

The sunlight seemed to dim as she read, sinking deeper and deeper into the silent world inside the book. A chill crawled up her back as a house appeared above her. At first it was just a shadow in the mist, but as she approached, she made out the muted shape of a grassy hill, a stone foundation, and white walls. At either end of the house, a stone chimney rose from the slanted rooftop.

Sefia gasped. She knew where she was—where the book had taken her. And she knew what she would find inside the house. She knew what she would see, and she went cold the moment the door swung open, and she was faced with the fragile silence inside.

But part of her, deep down, a part of her she could not quite subdue, wanted to see. To see him again, though it would not be him, not really, lying on the floor of the kitchen.

She kept reading. She couldn't stop. She watched the house break into tiny pieces and drop away. She watched the girl in the book step inside, trembling, her wet shoes leaving mud and bits of grass on the carpets. She watched her pass through the living room and the dining room—the rugs unraveling and the table splintering and the paintings on the walls turning to dust.

She reached the kitchen, and it was just as she remembered: the whitewashed cabinetry, chipped at the corners; the tile countertop; the wooden cutting board scored and nicked with age. Even the crumbs in the floorboards were the same, from the egg-and-vegetable tart they'd had the night before.

She was there.

There on the page and there in her memory, seeing it twice, seeing it all over again. Wanting to look away and
desperately needing to read on, needing to see him again. But she knew
it was him without having to look closely. She could not look closely. She knew it was him by the sheepskin slippers, by the shape of his trousers, by the oversize threadbare sweater. She knew it without having to see his face, because she could not see his face anymore. There was—

Sefia grabbed a bucket of tar from the deck beside her. She could barely see. Her eyes filmed over with tears. She raised the brush.

—no face left.

She dragged the bristles across the page, eclipsing the words.

Her father's killers had done more than kill him.

Every word.

They had destroyed him.

Every image.

They had taken his fingernails, his kneecaps, the lobes of his ears, his eyes and tongue.

Every memory.

The sentences grew dark and indecipherable under her brush. The smell of smoke filled her body. She thrust the bucket away from her, and it spilled over the deck, black and sticky. She dropped the brush. Specks of tar spattered her clothing, her hands and arms, her chin.

Were there footsteps? Was she retreating into the living room, to the fireplace and her secret staircase?

Someone took hold of her. They had her! This wasn't how it had been. She writhed in their grasp. She hadn't made it to the tunnel in time. They were going to take her away. They were
going to kill her. They had killed her father and now they were going to kill her too. She screamed.

“What's wrong, Sef?” A voice like the bellows of a forge. Large arms and hands like hammers clasped her from behind. “What happened?”

Someone else knelt in front of her, his hands on hers. Two crossed fingers. Strong like twine. She blinked. Archer's face swam into view. Archer. Yes, Archer. She was with Archer, and Horse was behind her, asking what was wrong. She was on the ship. She was in the wind. There had been no wind that day. Tenderly, tenderly, Archer swept a lock of hair away from her forehead, along her temple, and back behind her ear. Archer. She clutched at his arms.

“I'm in the book,” she whispered.

She looked down at the disfigured page, with its hideous black marks, and the words came lunging out at her, empty eyes and open jaws. She was caught. She was being sucked down with them, into the book, down into that darkness, into that cold cube of darkness in the walls of her basement bedroom, where she crouched, sobbing into the cold clay floor.

Her father was dead. He was dead. And gone forever.

L
on crept through the corridors, his bare feet achingly cold against the snowy marble. He gritted his teeth against the chill and passed under the domed mosaic arches as quietly as he could. He would never master the Second's eerie stalking silence, and he could hear his shallow breaths and the slippery shifting of his feet in the vaulted stone hallways.

From the walls, the painted eyes of former Directors seemed to follow him, their faces austere, their lips unmoving. Their countenances were so lifelike that sometimes he was sure they would leap out of their frames in the deep of night, flat hands grabbing, clothes rippling behind them in unseen winds.

In the Library, the long curved tables were bare; the reading lamps, unlit. The bookshelves with their neatly ordered manuscripts slumbered in the shadows, while overhead pale moonlight wafted through the stained glass windows, lighting on the bronze statues of past Librarians standing vigil over the galleries.

Lon hesitated at the threshold, but there was no sign of movement. He had at least two hours before the Master Librarian woke from his fitful sleep and came padding among the bookshelves to check a cross-reference, a footnote, a scribble in the margins. Lon slipped into the Library, clinging to the walls as the Second had instructed him, pretending that he too could melt seamlessly into dapplings of light on the marble floor.

He passed the vault, trailing his hand along the steel spokes, the keyholes like compass roses, and he pressed his ear to the door, as if he could hear the rustling of pages inside. But, as always, he heard nothing, and continued to the shelves beyond. Lon tapped his fingers against each of the spines and slipped one of the books into his arms. The scent of leather, paper, and glue drifted around him, making him smile. There was only one smell he loved more than the smell of a book.

As usual, the Second had arrived before him, and the faint scent of metal still lingered in the air. She'd left the doors to the greenhouse ajar, with just enough space for him to slide through sideways, and he inhaled deeply as he stepped into the garden.

Outside, flecks of snow spiraled out of the black sky, landing on the glass walls and melting instantly, but the air of the greenhouse was warm and damp and smelled of earth. Lon walked quietly into the center of the indoor meadow and looked around. White primroses huddled beneath the trees, and cyclamen with their green and silver leaves were scattered among the hedges and outcroppings of rocks like strange cups of snow.

“You're late.” The Second's familiar voice slid from the shadows.

Lon grinned lopsidedly at her. She was so silent that he was
never quite sure where she would appear, like a fish breaking the surface of a black pond, and every time he saw her he felt like a witness to some rare creature that would disappear again if he blinked.

“Not by much.” He handed her the book.

The Second wore dark green pajamas, and her black hair flowed loosely around her shoulders, blending into the curves of her back. Her feet were bare, and the cuffs of her pajama pants rose past her ankles as she sat in the grass, settling the book in her lap. She ran her fingers along the edges of the cover and peered up at him. “What is it?”

Lon plopped down beside her. “A manual on the Transformation of water into ice. I think you'll like it. In the winter of the Northern Wars, General Varissa ran out of ammunition, so she began making ice spears to launch at enemy ships. You're not a Soldier, but I thought maybe you could apply the same principle to something smaller.”

The Second smiled. “And untraceable.”

“Yeah.”

She pulled a set of throwing stars from the folds of her clothing. They were made of some mysterious metal with no shine to it, some material developed especially for the Assassins. She held them up and grinned. “Are you still bored with juggling?”

Lon was nearly seventeen now, and three years since his induction, he'd finally graduated to the second tier of Illumination: Manipulation, a more complicated magic that involved directing the currents of light in the Illuminated world to maneuver objects from one place to another.

After four weeks of slow, painful drills in the practice room,
Erastis had still only allowed him to manipulate one object at a time. So he had started meeting with the Second in secret. Although at nineteen she was away from the Library more often and their lessons were infrequent, under her tutelage, he finally felt like his progress matched his ambition.

But at the sight of the throwing stars he grimaced. He had done juggling drills with her before, but those had always been with palm-sized beanbags that he could catch if he faltered. There would be no catching tonight. He didn't even like paper cuts, and shuddered to think of what it would feel like if one of the throwing stars nicked him.

“Stand over there.” She pointed to a clear section of grass. “You can start with one, and I'll toss in the others if I think you're ready.”

Lon took a deep breath and stood where she told him, allowing his sense of the Illuminated world to rise up inside him. Then he blinked, and the entire greenhouse began to glimmer with golden threads of light, swirling and shifting and moving with the slow growth of the trees, the upward inching of flowers.

“Ready—”

A throwing star whirred at him through the dark. He barely saw it coming. At the last second he found the golden thread of its trajectory and swept his hands through the air. The star went spinning upward into the darkness.

“Not so high,” the Second said sharply.

The weapon was headed for the glass ceiling. Before it struck, Lon raised his hand and waved it down again. It hung in the air for a second and came looping back toward him. Up
and down, he whirled the star, hands pushing and pulling at the golden currents as if they were streams of water. Up and down, over and over, while the Second pored over the Commentary he had brought for her, her hair falling down around the sides of the book, her fingers dipping and flexing in the air beside her as she practiced the techniques described within the pages.

Just as his movements became automatic, she threw another star at him. Instinctively, he dodged, but it grazed his shoulder.

“Good thing I wasn't aiming for you,” the Second said without lifting her head.

Lon didn't have time to respond. It was heading for the glass wall. Struggling to keep the other circling in the air, he found the blazing course of the second star and pulled it back toward him. The pain in his shoulder was quick and clean, but it continued to sting long after he'd gotten both throwing stars under control. He tried to keep them together, sifting through his Sight and moving his hands up and down, up and down, over and over.

Eventually the Second helped him get all five throwing stars zipping in circles overhead, their strange dark shapes flitting like bats. Then she gradually whisked them out of their orbits and back into her waiting hands. He didn't know how she caught them without cutting herself; it must have been an Assassin thing.

Panting and sweating from the effort, Lon collapsed on the grass beside her. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her close the book and brush her hair over her shoulders.

“Erastis thinks I'm not ready, but look at what I can do!” he crowed.

The Second raised her eyebrows skeptically. “With my help.”

“Of course.” He grinned up at her and waved airily at the darkened Library. “When I'm the Master Librarian, I won't spend so much time cooped up there. To make any real changes, you have to be out in the world. I've read about former Librarians who traveled across Kelanna, solving border disputes. Others spent their careers studying the natural world, making scientific breakthroughs. Did you know that's how we got electricity? Not from the Book. From the
world
.”

“Hasn't it occurred to you that that's exactly how Erastis contributes to the cause? By remaining in the Library, studying the Book?”

“Of course it's occurred to me. But that's not enough. Not for me.” Lon gazed through the ceiling. “When I'm the Librarian, I'm going to do great things. Things that would seem impossible to anyone else.”

The Second's laughter swirled around him like flakes of ash. “I can see it now. You'll be the one responsible for this long peace Edmon is always talking about.”

“Yes. Why not?”

“Because you're sloppy.” She aimed a finger at his torn sleeve, the slender scab beneath.

“I'll get better.” He chuckled. “Erastis isn't going anywhere; I've got time.”

The Second tucked her hair back, exposing the perfect folds of her ear.

“Did you like the book?” he asked.

She nodded. “Watch.”

Lon sat up as she raised her fingers. Drops of moisture rose from the grass beside her, gleaming like pearls as she transformed them into bullets of ice. She twirled them in the air for a second and snapped her fingers forward like she was shooting marbles. They flew outward and were gone, lost in the darkness of the greenhouse.

“All right, and . . . ?” he asked.

The Second tilted her head at him and set the book down. Then she rose gracefully to her feet, walked across the grass, and came back with a single cyclamen pinched between her thumb and forefinger. Sitting down again, she held it out to Lon, who began laughing quietly.

Each of its folded papery petals had been pierced by a small dart of ice, leaving behind tiny perforations that winked like fireflies in the light.

“You're amazing,” he said.

She stopped smiling instantly and looked away. All he could see of her was the back of her head and the slope of her shoulder. Their friendship functioned when they were working, when she was tutoring him or he was finding Fragments for her to study. But if he tried to ask her who she was, how she felt, what things were like for her, she locked herself away. It wasn't her fault. She was the Apprentice Assassin—known only as the Second—and beyond that she didn't get to have an identity, or opinions, or feelings.

“I'm sorry,” he said, knowing he shouldn't. She didn't like apologies. Apologies made things worse.

The Second was still. In the dark of the greenhouse at night, she seemed to dissolve into the background.

Which is about right,
Lon thought. It was her job to kill, and then to vanish as if she had never been.
Being there
—having family or friends, forging the human connections that made your life meaningful—was a privilege for others, not for her. Erastis had told him this was required of all Assassins, if they were to master their art. To be a perfect killer, you couldn't really exist.

“Lon?” she said. His name floating out of the darkness.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to read me.”

“What?”

She turned around: the corner of her eyebrow and the curve of her cheek, the wet shine to her eyes, the tip of her nose. “Read me.”

He blanched at the thought. You didn't read other people. As soon as he had learned the Sight, he had learned this. Reading someone was more than rude. It was an intrusion into the very core of a person, deeper than any needle or spear could go. Maybe they did it to their enemies, but never to each other.

“But—”

“I want you to see.”

Lon swallowed. He was repelled by the thought even as he was drawn to it. To read
her
, who so entranced and delighted and challenged him? To
really
see her?

He tried focusing on her face, on the spilling of her hair over her shoulder, on her razorlike movements, but his vision seemed to roll off her like beads of water over feathers. Was this something Assassins did to themselves? Something that made them impenetrable, even to the Sight?

His gaze fell to her hand. It was covered in scars. Notches in her skin. Welts. Nicks and pink punctures. Glittering with history. He blinked, and all of a sudden he saw her practicing, her movements like a dancer around the polished wooden floor. The cracks to her knuckles. Red blood welling out of her.

He saw her childhood. Her mother sweeping her into her arms, giggling, fingers running like spiders over her tummy. The shrieks of her laughter rippling through the kitchen with its wooden table and cast-iron pots, and her father standing at the stove grinning, a spatula raised above a sizzling pan.

She used to watch her parents tending to patients in the front room of their house. Mine accidents. Burn victims. Stained sheets and clear glass bottles. Sometimes the smell of rubbing alcohol and blood lingered for days afterward.

When her parents noticed that she was unfazed by their work, they were delighted.
It's no wonder!
they said. It was a sign that she wasn't sick at the sight of a little blood. She was going to be a doctor just like her mommy and daddy!

The currents of light shifted, and Lon saw her initiation ceremony. The swearing in. The stealing of her name, like a wind howling out of the north, whipping the syllables away into nothingness.