The Reader

by Traci Chee

  “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.

  He saw her kills, one after another, the way the light went out of them, the way they collapsed as if they were sacks of stones.

  He saw her at age eighteen, clutching the hilt of her newly formed bloodsw
ord as she crept up the flagstone steps to a little cabin. She entered the front room, her memory of the place washing over her. There was the same operating table, the same glass syringes.

  Her parents’ house.

  She drew her bloodsword, and the blade flashed. Blood coated the steel.

  First her father.

  Then her mother, who cradled her crying daughter even as she died, murmuring soft and close into her hair, “Mareah. Mareah. My little Mareah.”

  Lon blinked, and the lights of the Illuminated world faded away. The Second was watching him, the moon of her face rising in front of him.

  She’d killed her parents.

  That’s the first thing she’d done with her bloodsword?

  That’s what her master had made her do?

  To forsake all ties to kin and kingdom. To ensure—to test—her loyalty. It was unthinkably cruel. And yet someone had thought of it. Their order had thought of it.

  He lifted his hand. He cradled her face, with his thumb just brushing the point of her chin. “Mareah,” he whispered.

  The word pooled in her eyes. She smiled—a twisted smile, with a knot of pain at the center. She had a name.

  And then he was holding her. He was brushing his mouth against hers, tentatively at first and then, when she pushed back, harder, as if the pressure of his lips could for one moment make her forget her grief and horror and regret. Strands of her hair caught in his fingers, tangling them up. Her mouth was soft—softer than he could have imagined—and when he blinked he saw bursts of sparks like fire and gold. Flashes of their entwined lives. Stolen kisses. Heated breath. The future. They would do great things together. Magic no one had ever dreamed of.

  And then he shut down the Sight so all he felt was the movement of her lips, and all he smelled was the wind and copper of her skin, and all he saw when he opened his eyes was the shadows of her cheeks, her eyelashes like scythes, and the glass ceiling peppered with snow.

  Chapter 30

  The Book of Everything

  When Sefia awoke, she found herself in a bed. It had been so long since she’d slept anywhere but on the ground, in trees, trussed up in a hammock in the bowels of the ship, that she spent an entire minute memorizing the firmness of the mattress, the prickling of the feather pillow. If she kept her eyes closed, she could almost fool herself into thinking she was nine years old again, curled up in her bed with her stuffed crocodile tucked in beside her.

  Tears trickled down her cheeks.

  Her father.

  She opened her eyes, squinting in the light that filtered through the portholes. Around her, bottles of medicine, jars of ointment, and half-mended sails lined the walls. Bundles of dried herbs hung from the ceiling, filling the air with the mixed aroma of feverfew and bitter orange.

  “Look who’s awake.”

  At the sound of Reed’s voice, Sefia sat up. Her body felt heavy and cold, as if she had been sleeping in snow. She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “What happened?”

  “You tell me.” He was perched on a stool at the foot of the bunk, one tattooed arm slung over his knee. He extended a tin cup toward her. “Doc said you should drink this when you woke.”

  Sefia brought the cup to her lips. The liquid was acrid and citrusy, but as soon as she swallowed it, she felt less hollow, less iced over on the inside.

  The captain leaned against the wall, tracing two circles over the curve of his knee, in and out of each other like snakes. “Your boy’s on watch, but he’ll be down at eight bells. The kid’s hardly left your side.”

  Sefia tipped the tin cup in her numb hands. “How long have I been out?”

  “Half a day. Whatever you saw shook you up good.”

  She looked away, and that was when she noticed the book on the sideboard. Someone had closed it, penned up all the ages of history between two gold clasps. It was a wonder it didn’t sink the ship, taking everyone on it to the bottom of the sea.

  “I saw myself,” she murmured, “the day my father was murdered.”

  Captain Reed sat forward, his blue eyes burning. “You’re in the book?”

  Sefia nodded. “We’re all in the book. That must be why they want it so badly—the people who did this. I think the book contains everything that has happened or will happen. All of history. All knowledge. Everything.”

  Reed’s eyebrows went up past the brim of his hat. “I thought you said they were just stories.”

  “I thought they were.” She took another sip. “But now I think they’re a record. Of everything we’ve done and have yet to do.”

  “Me?”

  “You. Me. Everyone.”

  “I’m in the book.” He blinked a few times and passed his hand across his face, repeating, “I’m in the book. Can you show me?”

  Leaning over, Sefia set the cup down and pulled at the book until it came tumbling into her arms, feeling so familiar and so utterly alien at the same time. If she used her Vision now, she knew what she’d see: a bundle of light so dense it would be like staring into the sun, as all the blinding currents of history spiraled in on each other.

  This moment was in the book too. For a second she hesitated, afraid that when she opened it, she would be there—right there—looking down on herself as she read the book. She could see it, over and over, as if reflected between two mirrors, in a never-ending corridor:

  Reading herself in the book.

  Reading herself reading herself in the book.

  Reading herself reading herself reading herself . . .

  Maybe someone was reading her right now, and if she looked up, she would see their eyes staring down at her, following her every move. Maybe someone was reading the reader.

  She shuddered.

  But when she popped open the clasps, nothing peculiar happened. She leafed through the pages, skimming for signs of Reed’s name among the dusty paragraphs and disjointed phrases, but the stories were gone. “I’m sorry. It’s too big. I could spend a lifetime looking and never find you.”

  The captain sighed and sat back. “Too good to hope for, I reckon.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “If I was in the book—permanently, y’know—and there was a place for me to rest, where I could exist, even after I died . . . maybe I wouldn’t have to do all this.”

  “All what, sir?”

  “Everything.” He shrugged. “This treasure hunt Dimarion’s got me on. The Trove of the King.”

  Piles of gold so high you could climb them like mountains and slide back down, trailing tinkling sounds and flashes of light.

  “So that’s why you’re going to Jahara,” she said.

  He smiled sadly. “I been promised a good story.”

  Sefia closed the book. From the cover, the blinked up at her like some cataractous eye. “Learn what the book is for,” she murmured. “Rescue Nin.” She paused, her fingertip at the apex of the circle. “I had the answers I was looking for the whole time.”

  “Sef—”

  “If you knew how to use it, you could know what someone would do before they even had the idea to do it. You could find out the locations of treasures or the secrets of kings. You could even know where to find your enemies, and how to kill them.” When she looked up, her dark eyes were bright with desperation. “They’re in here somewhere. If I find them, I’ll know who they are. I’ll know where they’ll be, and then I can—”

  “Sefia.”

  “What?”

  “You said yourself you could spend your whole life lookin’.”

  In her mind’s eye, Sefia saw herself hunched over the book, growing frail and nearsighted as the years piled up around her and the lights of her life burned low. She dug into the pages, as if they’d squeal beneath her fingers.

  “After the maelstrom . . .” The captain looked thoughtfully at the book, though he didn�
�t move to take it. “After I learned how I was gonna die, I coulda stopped sailin’,” he said, still tracing those interconnected circles on his knee. “I knew it’d happen at sea. Coulda lived forever if I’d stayed on land.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Swearin’ allegiance to lords and fancy ladies? Carvin’ out my survival from trees and stone? I’d rather rot in the ground.” Captain Reed regarded her levelly. “You got a choice, Sef. Control your future, or let your future control you.”

  Above, the ship’s bell began to toll. Once, twice . . . eight times. The sounds echoed inside her icy chest.

  Then Archer appeared in the doorway, sweat gleaming at the edges of his face, his hair and clothing damp, and Sefia smiled—a real smile. He seemed to radiate heat.

  And he didn’t seem to notice when Sefia passed the book to Reed, golden clasps gleaming, begging to be opened.

  She almost snatched it back.

  But the captain gently drew it from her fingers and as he took it down the hall, she felt its pull on her growing weaker and weaker, until she could barely feel it at all.

  Archer knelt beside her, tracing the edges of her face with his fingertips.

  Everywhere he touched seemed to glow with warmth, and cracks appeared in the bleak cold of her heart. She caught his hand with hers and held it to her cheek, skin to skin. “I saw my father,” she whispered.

  “The Boy from the Sea”

  HARISON’S FAVORITE SONG

  It was years ago now, on a warm summer night,

  When the boy came out of the sea.

  His skin was blue and his hair was white,

  And he was in love with me.

  He was wild and true, and right then I knew

  That he was in love with me.