by Traci Chee
But some figures stood alone, isolated by blank space like tents pitched on winter slopes or lampposts on white roads.
Sefia stiffened.
She’d seen these signs before.
They had been carved onto some of her toys, brightly painted wooden blocks, their sides engraved with symbols and simple pictures. There had been a whole set of them.
A mongoose.
An artichoke.
A ring.
She used to sit in the kitchen for hours, building caravans on the table while her mother sliced up garden vegetables or butchered hens at the counter, her knife quick and confident on the cutting board, her brown hands flecked with pale scars. Every so often she’d look out the window for Sefia’s father, then turn back to Sefia and slide the blocks across the table—the snake, the elk, the feather—singing in her soft voice, “Ess-ee-eff-aye-ay.”
“Essie effai yay,” Sefia repeated, laughing.
“Yes.” Her mother brushed her cheek with the curve of her finger. “Sefia, my little Sefia.”
Sefia blinked tears out of her eyes and touched the mark, like she could impress it onto her skin.
“Ess,” she whispered.
The symbol had a meaning, and a sound, as if it had been plucked from the real world and pressed flat, like some strange dark flower, between the pieces of paper. And that sound was a hiss, like a sting or the sizzle of water on coals.
She scrubbed at her face. Her mother had been teaching her to decipher the symbols, before the fevers, the awful hacking and coughing and the blood-spattered handkerchiefs, the way her mother wasted away to almost nothing.
Her father had burned the blocks the day after her mother died. She remembered him crouched in front of the stone hearth, feeding her toys into the flames.
“Daddy, no!” She tried to stop him, but he caught her, drawing her flailing body into his arms.
“It’s not safe. You weren’t supposed to know,” he said, murmuring into her dark hair. “It’s not safe.”
Sefia let out a wail, crying for her mother.
“Mommy’s gone.” Her father stroked her hair as the firelight flickered over the scar at his temple. “She’s gone, Sefia. It’s just you and me now.”
She buried her cheek in the extra folds of his sweater and watched the paint curl as the fire consumed the blocks.
“We’re a team, you and me,” he said. “We’re in this together, no matter what.”
The sound of his weeping blended with hers, and she squeezed him tighter, like she’d never let go.
Sefia was crying again, her tears smudging the ink. She dabbed at the smears with the cuff of her shirt.
The strange symbols were words. The paper was filled with them. Were they messages? Magic? Some ancient wisdom entrusted only to her parents?
Why hadn’t her father continued teaching her?
Why hadn’t he given her anything to go on?
She narrowed her eyes and curled her lacerated fingertips into her palms.
It wasn’t safe. He was right about that.
They wanted it, and they’d never stop until they had it.
They’d come for her father. They’d come for Nin. And they would come for Sefia sooner or later. No one was safe.
Unless she stopped them.
Sefia closed the lid and clicked the clasps back into place. She’d use it against them if she could, but they would never lay their hands on it again.
All these years, she’d had someone to protect her, but now she was alone, and they were still out there. With Nin, if she wasn’t already . . . Sefia dug her fingers into the , hissing as the pressure stung her paper cuts. No. Nin needed her now. Needed her strength and her resilience, her cleverness and her resolve.
There was only one way to protect herself from the people who had destroyed her family.
She had to stop them herself.
• • •
She tried to pick up the trail again a day later when her ankle hurt less, but the rains had washed everything through, eliminating whatever footprints they’d left in the jungle. Though crowds made her uneasy, she scouted populated areas for signs of the woman in black and her mysterious companion, asking after them in nearby villages and in lumber encampments in the forest.
But no one had seen them.
No one knew anything.
It was as if they’d disappeared altogether, leaving her with only one clue: the strange box of paper with the symbol on the lid.
So she retreated into the thick jungles of Oxscini to sharpen her skills and study the object. She turned every hunt into a challenge now, made sure every arrow found its mark. She figured out how to throw knives and make poisoned arrows from the skins of frogs, to sneak up on prey twice her size and track targets in the dark.
Because she knew they were out there, the people who came for her father, who came for Nin, and who would come for her too . . . if she didn’t get to them first.
Sefia spent weeks stalking around Oxscini’s interior, poring over the papers, inspecting, searching, wondering. She took to making her camp in the trees, in a hammock fashioned out of rope, and when she took out the strange object, she felt like someone were peering over her shoulder, scanning the lines for secrets just as she was.
It didn’t take her long before she could recognize different marks as easily as she recognized animal tracks—the empty gasp of an O, the murmur of an M—but it wasn’t until a month later, on a night with a full moon shedding pale light over the canopy, while she was lying in her hammock with the object propped up on her knees, that she began to read.
A single line had caught her eye. Just a few markings clustered together, like the footprints of a sandpiper that has abruptly taken flight. They stood out because they were alone; the other marks paraded on and on across the paper, but these ones were flanked by white space.
She leaned so close to the paper that the tip of her nose nearly touched it, and she inhaled its pulpy odor. Furrowing her brow, she fought for the right sounds, willing her tongue and teeth to work—the whispered consonant, the hiss.
This
Grinning, she smacked the paper with the flat of her hand. She said it once more, memorizing the order of the shapes: “This!” The next word was faster:
is
And the one after, even quicker:
a
The last one made her pause. She struggled with the pieces, trying to force them together, to make them make sense.
“B-buh . . . buh . . .”
Then it came to her, in all its clarity, leaping like light out of a prism, into bands of color:
book.
She said the whole thing again, more sure of herself this time: “This is a book.” Her voice sounded awkward and resonant among the whispering trees, but she said it again, all together:
This is a book.
Like saying so made it true. She said it again, and again, not entirely certain that the final word meant anything, although the more she said it, the more it made sense. It was a book. This strange rectangular thing had named itself.
It had a name.
“Book.” Sefia grinned.
For a moment, she felt as if the marks were bright and burning. Gold crept in at the corners of her vision. Then she blinked, and the whole world flooded with light, whirling all around her in wide interconnected circles, up into the sky and among the stars. She’d seen the light before, but this one showed her the world was full of little golden currents, a million of them and a trillion motes of light, all perfect and exact and brimming with meaning.
The sight of it all knocked her back in the hammock. The book fell from her hands.
Magic. It made her feel like she was peering past the edges of the stars into whatever lay beyond.
She could feel herself, dimly, still in her own b
ody, still sitting in her hammock, but there was so much brilliant, churning light she felt like she could be swept away at any second, lost forever in the sea of gold.
It was terrifying to see so much. To drown, flailing, in light. Her stomach turned. Her temples throbbed. She clung to the side of the hammock, as if that would anchor her, as if that would stop the world from spinning.
Then she blinked, and it was gone, and Sefia lay there dizzy and gasping, trying to focus on the black forms of the trees, on a single star, to stop her vision from reeling.
What was this magic?
How did her parents come by it? And why did her enemies want it?
Did Nin know was it was for?
The unanswered questions wheeled around her as she pressed her hands to her head to stop the throbbing in her skull. The trees hunkered in close around her.
She repeated the words:
This is a book.
They were so small. There were dozens of other marks, hundreds of other words, just on that one sheet of paper—and on the next, more marks, more words . . . and the next and the next and the next.
Sefia thought of her vision, that sudden dizzying feeling that everything was huge and connected. Were there signs for each of the stars, and grains of sand on the beach? For tree or rock or river? For home? Would they look as beautiful as they sounded, hovering in the air?
It was as if, all this time, she’d been locked out, catching glimpses of some magical world through the crack beneath a door. But the book was the key, and if she could figure out how to use it, she’d be able to open the door, uncovering the magic that lay, rippling and shifting in unseen currents, beyond the world she experienced with her ears and tongue and fingertips.
And once she understood them all—all the signs, all the words—she’d find out the meaning of the symbol on the cover, and she’d find out why her family had been taken, and who had done it, and how to hunt them down.
Chapter 5
The Apprentice
Two weeks ago, just days after his fourteenth birthday, Lon would never have believed his life could change so drastically or so fast.
There’d been the usual morning traffic at the south gate—farmers and merchants heading up to Corabel’s tiered heights, sailors fresh from the sea, smelling of salt and mischief—but many of them were regulars, onto his tricks, so he didn’t work particularly hard at coaxing them to his table.
He slid the small brazier of coals closer to him, then back, a little to the left, and again to the right. He’d been clinging to the dwindling hope that his parents would return for his birthday and whisk him away from the city on some fantastic voyage to a distant land, where he’d begin an apprenticeship with a great seer, only to be kidnapped by a sand pirate desperate to find the cure for the sickness that plagued his beautiful daughter.
But his parents had been gone for six months, traveling with a troupe of other acrobats and actors and street performers. They didn’t make enough to hire messengers, so he had no idea when they’d be back. He didn’t even know if they were still in the kingdom of Deliene or if they’d traveled south to the other islands.
Sighing, Lon sprinkled a pinch of incense over the brazier, and in the sweet-scented smoke that spiraled from the embers, he felt as if his life were unraveling before him: a string of days that would turn into years, each one the same as the last, telling fortunes by the city gate, until he grew too feeble to carry his table out onto the street.
As the smoke dispersed, he spied an old man wandering through the crowd, his graying shoulder-length hair uncombed, his eyes darting wildly from the terra-cotta rooftops and ornamented iron balconies back to the cobblestone streets as if it were his first time in Corabel. You could always spot visitors to Deliene’s capital by their bewildered looks and crooked necks as they tried to take in all the busy sights of the city on the hill.
Squinting, Lon studied him carefully. The man’s skin was dark and wrinkled as a walnut shell, though there was little sun damage on his face and hands. His sweeping velvet robes were ill suited to travel on the crowded streets, and as other passersby stepped on his trailing hems, Lon caught sight of his soft slippers, the uppers already splitting from the soles.
He must work inside, Lon observed, but he left the house today without thinking to change his clothes. In a hurry? Or just absentminded? And if he was a visitor to Corabel, why did he look like he had just stepped out of his house in his dressing gown?
“Hey, grandfather!” Lon called. “Over here!”
Blinking, the old man looked up. He seemed to have trouble focusing.
He probably wears glasses. Lon stood, waving him over.
The old man made his way through the handcarts and fishmongers fresh from the sea, stubbing his toes on the cobbles and bumping into sailors on shore leave. He collapsed gratefully on the short stool Lon offered him, dabbing at his brow with the edge of his embroidered sleeve.
Lon grinned. After that, it only took a little prodding to learn the old man’s name—Erastis—and a little more to get him to exchange a few copper zens to have his fortune told.
“Take a pinch of incense and sprinkle it over the coals,” Lon explained, pocketing the man’s coins. “I’ll be able to see what’s in store for you in the smoke.”
Obediently, Erastis did as he was told. The fire crackled and through the smoke, Lon began scrutinizing him, mentally noting the callus on the middle finger of his right hand, the ink stains and the stray hair on his embroidered sleeve, the curve of his back and shoulders, the purple shadows beneath his eyes, the shallow indentations on the bridge of his nose.
But Erastis didn’t bat an eye when Lon explained that he wore glasses, that he rarely went out but was on an important errand, that he spent most of his time hunched over a table, inking fine details with a sable brush.
The old man smiled, creasing his already wrinkled face. “Any con artist could tell me that. I heard you were special.”
Lon balked. “From who?”
“You tell me.”
Never one to back down from a challenge, Lon swept his hands through his dark hair, making it stand up at the ends. Inhaling deeply, he stared straight into Erastis’s hazel eyes. He felt his awareness begin to split in two as the bright colors and the clatter of traffic began to fade, replaced by his perception of the world that went beyond sight and sound and smell. Usually, all it took was some observation and a few leading comments, and his clients would practically tell him what they wanted to hear. But when he needed it, there was always this double vision. He needed to concentrate to divide his consciousness between the physical world and the shining one beneath it, and he always came up sick to his stomach, as if he’d swallowed too much seawater, but in the worst of times this extra sense got him paid and kept him fed, and he was more than a little proud of it.
He could look at the detail on a patched sleeve and watch its history unfold before him in scattered images: old mottled hands sewing in the guttering candlelight, a grandfather on his deathbed, a journey to the capital to register his passing with the Historians in the Hall of Memory.
If he examined the empty setting on an old brooch, he’d see what happened to the missing gem: a miserly master, a midnight theft, a pawnbroker, ailing children, and draughts of foul-smelling medicine.
Lon blinked, and his extra sense swam into focus. Bands of gold flooded over the old man’s head and shoulders, streaming down his arms to his slender hands, where they pooled with meaning.
And he knew why Erastis had come.
“This is only the third time in the past decade that you’ve left home, but someone named Edmon said it was important.” Lon passed a hand across his face, surprised. “He said I was important. He said you’d want to meet me. ‘Because the Library has been without an Apprentice for too long.’”
Lon blinked again, and his extra sense ebbed out of him.
The light disappeared, leaving him swaying slightly as he fought off the dizziness, the nausea. “What’s a Library? How’d he know where I was in the first place?”
“Your gifts.” Erastis tucked his hair behind his ears and leaned forward. “Other people are born with talents like yours. You’ve heard of them, I’m sure: seers, conjurers, makers of magic weapons. Most legendary figures have some sort of ability that makes them noteworthy.”
Lon beamed. “Like the man with the strength of an ox? Like the jeweler who made the Cursed Diamonds of Lady Delune?”
“They’re amateurs compared to us. We can teach you to use your gifts with the precision of a scalpel.”
“Who are you?”
“We are a society of readers.” Erastis smiled. “People like you.”
Readers. Lon tested the word on his tongue, though the reverence in the old man’s voice kept him from saying it aloud.
“We were formed long ago,” the old man continued, “before any of the Historians can remember, when each wave of history erased everything that had come before. All was chaos and darkness, and into that darkness we became the light, charged with the protection of all the citizens of Kelanna.”
Lon frowned. Ever since the resolution of the blood feud between the Ken and Alissar provinces, Deliene had been doing all right, but every day he heard news of war in Everica, of famine and ruination in Liccaro, the Desert Kingdom. “You’re not doing a great job of it, are you?”
“Eh, you try protecting an entire world from itself.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“True.” Erastis smiled ruefully. “We have great plans for you.”
He described the wondrous feats of magic Lon could achieve if he joined them. They’d walk among the mountains and across seas, like the adventurers and outlaws that filled his daydreams, all oceans and sailing ships and pops of gunfire. Their deeds would bring peace to an unstable world, preserved in legend among the stars.
“There’s never been peace like that. Not once,” Lon pointed out.
“There will be.”
