CHAPTER 5: THE FIRST PAGE

  Irena’s grip slipped. Her chest slammed into the jagged edge again, splinters biting through fabric into skin. Air was forced out of her lungs with a yelp, and she gasped for breath and registered, with vague irritation, that she remained inconveniently alive.

  “Hold— hold on—” Lira gasped as she pulled on her arm. “Don’t fall, Your Highness, please don’t fall.”

  “I am trying,” Irena rasped.

  Broken boards crushed her ribs. The edge dug into her hips so hard she could already feel bruises blooming. Her legs dangled into shadow, and every shift made the fractured blanks groan beneath her weight.

  Lira’s small face appeared over the torn floor, dust drifting around her like a halo of smoke. Her eyes were enormous, freckles standing out starkly on her face, which had gone chalk-white.

  “I’m going to pull. Ready?”

  “Very well.” Irena forced her boots back onto the beam, toes scrabbling until they found solid purchase. She braced. Lira’s hands clamped around her wrist. For someone half her size, the maid had a grip like a smithy’s vice.

  “On three. One. Two. Three—”

  They heaved.

  Pain ripped along Irena’s ribs as the boards bit deeper. Her boots skidded. For one sickening heartbeat she dropped another inch, heard something below crack apart, and felt the floor shift beneath her.

  “Damn it—” She kicked, shoved, drove her weight forward with everything she had left.

  Lira growled through her teeth, thin forearms trembling as she leaned back, heels digging into the boards.

  The timber shrieked.

  Irena’s hips scraped over the edge. She slammed her elbows down, dragged herself forward, and spilt out onto solid flooring in a graceless heap.

  For a long moment, she lay flat on her back, staring at the cracked ceiling, gasping and panting for air. She just lay there on the boards, staring up at the cracked ceiling. The tower creaked around them, but soon settled.

  The worst of it seemed to be over. Lira flopped onto her backside beside her, clutching her own chest, breathing just as hard.

  “You are the most reckless person I have ever met,” she said when she could speak.

  “I doubt that,” Irena croaked. “But thank you.”

  “You could have died,” Lira’s voice shook. “You could have fallen and broken your neck, and I would have had to explain to the Baron how the King’s daughter fell through the floor because she wanted to steal an old chair!”

  “I wasn’t stealing the chair!” Irena huffed, rolling onto one elbow, still breathing hard. Every motion made her ribs ache and her hip throb. “I was investigating. There is a distinct difference!”

  “Well, you nearly investigated yourself down three floors and into the cellar!”

  “Well, then, at least I would get to see what is hidden away down there,” Irena said, and only realised how ridiculous that sounded once she had said it.

  Lira stared at her, expression somewhere between fury and incredulity. Then her gaze dropped to the object still clutched in Irena’s hand.

  “Well, what is it?” she demanded.

  Irena looked too.

  The tube for which she had nearly killed herself lay streaked with dust, but the wood beneath gleamed where her fingers had wiped it clean. Tarnished metal bands circled its length, engraved with faint, looping designs. It felt heavy in her hands. Solid. Built to survive a fall or three.

  “I am not entirely certain,” she said, and the admission sent a thrill through her. “Let us inspect it properly.”

  Irena pushed herself upright. Her knee twinged. Her hip objected. Her pride remained mostly intact. Mostly. She glanced back. The boards before the abandoned furniture now sagged in a dangerous dip where the beam had snapped.

  “Come,” she said, offering Lira her free hand. “Before the rest of this corridor decides to follow suit.”

  Lira took her hand, fingers still trembling. Irena pulled her to her feet. They edged back across the sturdier boards, keeping close to the wall, moving with deliberate care as though the corridor watched them and waited for an excuse to collapse.

  By the time they reached the stairwell, Irena’s breathing had steadied. The shaking in her limbs had sharpened into a bright, crackling energy. The raw horror of dangling over empty air had faded into an echo.

  Something else took its place.

  At court, danger came dressed in silk and smiles, or so she had at least always been warned. Polite betrayals. Political intrigue. No one there tried to drop her through a floor; they preferred their violence indirect and deniable. The hypothetical poisoned chalice, as it was taught to her, was a strategic trap, and almost never an actual attempt at murder.

  This had been different. Brutal. Immediate. Nothing between her and broken bones but her own grip and Lira’s stubborn strength.

  It was terrifying.

  It was... thrilling.

  They slipped into the gutted library below.

  The air still carried a faint trace of old parchment and dust, though most of the shelves had been stripped bare years ago. Pale rectangles marked the walls where bookcases had once climbed from floor to ceiling. An overturned stool sulked in one corner, one leg snapped clean through. A handful of tables remained, warped but serviceable, abandoned as not worth the effort of hauling down endless stairs.

  Irena set the tube on the nearest table carefully, as if it were but glass, then leaned back against the stone wall. For a long moment, she did nothing. She felt the cold solidity at her spine. The steady thud of her heart against bruised ribs. The phantom sensation of empty air still yawning beneath her dangling legs.

  Then she laughed.

  The sound slipped out of her, thin and breathless, edged with disbelief. She clapped a hand over her mouth, not entirely sure why she was doing it. The laugh tumbled from her anyway, turning into something almost like a sob before settling into a breathless exhale.

  Lira, who had followed her in and drawn herself tall for what promised to be a formidable scolding, froze in the doorway.

  “What?” she said, warily.

  Irena shook her head, pressing her lips together to contain another outburst. “Nothing. Just… I very nearly died for a dusty tube.”

  Lira’s gaze flicked to the scroll case and back.

  “That’s not funny,” she said automatically.

  “No,” Irena agreed. “It is hardly appropriate. It is—”

  Absurd. Terrifying. Exhilarating.

  She swallowed the rest. “It is done. We shall be fine.”

  Lira’s mouth flattened into its familiar line of disapproval. But when she caught sight of Irena’s helpless grin, the corners betrayed her, creasing into the faintest smile that mirrored Irena’s own.

  A reluctant snort escaped.

  “That was a terrible idea,” Lira said.

  “Yes.”

  “And I am never letting you go up there alone again.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And if you try anything like that without telling me, I will— I will…”

  She faltered, clearly struggling to invent a fitting punishment for royalty.

  “Scold me?” Irena suggested.

  “Yes,” Lira said, cheeks going pink. “Very sternly!”

  The absurdity of it hit both of them at once. They stood in the hollowed-out library, grinning like fools who had just cheated death.

  The world, somehow, was still turning.

  Irena pushed away from the wall and turned to the scroll case, her laughter fading into a sharp and intent focus.

  “Let us see what I nearly broke my neck for,” she said.

  The cap came off with a little pop, followed by a whisper of stale air that smelled faintly of old books and something sharper, like stale ink. Or that metallic charge she tasted when she first entered the tower.

  Inside lay a tightly rolled parchment, the colour of old bone.

  Irena eased it free with two fingers. The scroll resisted, stiff with age, then yielded with a faint crackle.

  “Careful,” Lira whispered. She hovered close enough that Irena could feel her warmth, which was unbelievably distracting, but Irena forced herself to ignore it. Lira tucked her hands back as though she might be capable of doing damage just by existing near it.

  “I am being careful!” Irena huffed, concentrating on her grip. “I am hardly going to destroy this thing after nearly dying in that fall to get it.”

  She began to unroll it.

  The outer layer flaked immediately. A crescent of parchment snapped off and drifted to the table in curling slivers. Both of them winced.

  “There,” Irena muttered. “Lesson learned.”

  The scroll would not survive being rolled and unrolled at whim. Every flex of the old material threatened to shear away ink that had survived longer than either of them had been alive.

  “We need it flat,” she said. “Somewhere it can stay open.”

  “This table?” Lira suggested.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Irena pressed on it. It wobbled with a rattle. She shook her head. “Something sturdier.”

  Together they combed the room.

  A narrower table in the far corner proved sturdier, its legs sunk solidly into the stone. Lira tested it by leaning on it and bouncing on her toes against one end; it shifted, but held. Irena considered it good enough.

  Transporting the scroll demanded reverence. Lira slid a cracked tray beneath it, and together they carried it across the room like novices bearing a relic, freezing whenever Irena or Lira tipped the tray without meaning to.

  Under a higher arrow-slit window that let in a blade of cold light, Irena began again.

  This time she unrolled it by breaths. Lira passed her things that might act as decent weights: a chipped inkwell, smooth stones, and a brass buckle abandoned from some forgotten belt. They carefully pinned the edges down, holding the parchment in place without piercing it. Little by little, the scroll surrendered itself open.

  Inked marks crowded the exposed surface. Faded, but stubbornly dark. The script was rendered in a careful, deliberate hand, with strokes steady and disciplined. There were no idle flourishes. No ornamental excess. Whoever had written this had planned out every single mark on the page.

  And stranger things still dwelt amidst the letters. Symbols and diagrams, meanings obfuscated by the unfamiliar configuration of the letters.

  Irena braced her hands on the table and leaned closer. At first, the page refused to yield to her understanding, all meaning unclear. Then her mind began to sort through what was actually on the page.

  “That curve—” she murmured. “That is an s. Or it was, before the reform. They used to double the hook. See?”

  She traced the shape in the air just above the parchment, careful not to actually touch it.

  “And that…” her eyes narrowed. “That should be a t. They still decorated the cross stroke in the early texts.”

  “You can read it?” Lira asked, sceptical.

  “I can recognise it for what it is,” Irena said.

  She leaned closer. Here and there were things that she recognised. A conjunction she had seen in an early treatise. An old conditional particle, longer and more elaborate than its modern form. A word that might have been a declaration or a summons, depending on the vowel shift. The spelling had shifted between eras, the language far removed from what it had since become.

  Her pulse quickened.

  “I have learned to read something like this,” she said quietly. “Though, I admit, this seems a tad older. The grammar is… different. Some of the words seem familiar enough, though I suppose they might just appear that way. The verbs seem to be at the end of phrases instead. And there are declensions we no longer use…” She frowned. “But the roots appear to be the same.”

  She tried to say a few words under her breath. The rhythm felt right, even as the words refused to reveal their meaning.

  “What about those?” Lira asked.

  She pointed — carefully — to the symbols and diagrams between the text. They were layered circles and intersecting lines. Triangles folded into themselves. Geometries as arcane as the language that surrounded them.

  Irena studied them longer.

  “Sigils,” she said at last. “They are not decorative. They seem to have sections of text that define their syntax.” She scanned the lines. “Look. There is a block of text for each section of the image. It probably explains it…”

  “Explains it?” Lira seemed baffled. “Like it’s supposed to do something?”

  “Yes.” Irena’s might raced uncertainly. “The text reads as instructions. I think these sigils might be… anchors. Conditions. Components. Something to do with…”

  “... Magic…” Lira breathed in awe.

  “... Yes.”

  Irena scanned another passage and caught a fragment of text that made sense in isolation.

  si Umbrale nominatum sit

  —if the threshold be named—

  Her breath caught. But the next line descended into archaic declensions she could not yet decipher.

  “I do not know what this says,” Irena admitted, frustration plain in her voice. “I have read charters, sermons, early concordance texts. Those were ceremonial. This—” She waved her hand at the scroll. “This is dense and technical.”

  “Is it about the door?” Lira asked quietly. “Or the stones outside? Will it let you leave?”

  “If we are fortunate,” Irena said quietly. Hope and hunger alike wrestled in her chest. “If not, it may describe something entirely unrelated and quite useless to us.”

  Lira stared at the page. “It looks like spider-writing,” she murmured. “Like if you look at it for too long, it will climb off the page and get in your head.”

  Irena straightened, flexing her shoulders to work out the stiffness that had already crept in from hunching. “That is because you cannot parse it.”

  “You can’t either.”

  “Not yet…” The words felt like a promise. “Give me time. The letters are the same. It is a root language. And I am not unschooled. If I can work at it for long enough, perhaps I can…”

  “You will work it out,” Lira finished for her.

  “I shall understand it,” Irena corrected her. “And once I understand it, yes, I shall be able to work with whatever is detailed on this page.”

  She bent again over the scroll, lips moving silently as she tested the shapes of the old vowels without voicing them. Already her mind assembled columns: archaic form, probable root, modern equivalent. Lists, columns, little mental glossaries.

  Behind her, Lira shifted her weight from foot to foot.

  “We shouldn’t—,” she started before stopping, then spoke softly. “We shouldn’t look at old spells. Not even the drawings.”

  “I realise that your grandmother has so many stories,” Irena said, with affectionate impatience. “But we are not in a story. Madness does not leap off parchment. Words are our tools to master.”

  “That doesn’t mean she was wrong,” Lira protested.

  “No,” Irena conceded. “But if anyone is going to make me lose my mind, it will be Baron Caldar Brennec trapping me here for the rest of my life.”

  That drew a reluctant huff from Lira. She watched Irena for a long moment as the princess studied the page, face intent, fear still lingering in her eyes but braided now with something fiercer. Curiosity. Resolve. And a reluctant, growing acceptance that whatever this was, whatever it did, they were now caught up in it together.

  By the time the light in the library dimmed to evening grey, Irena’s head ached and her eyes burned. She had managed, she thought, to pick out a handful of definite terms from the sea of ink. A word that might mean “string.” Another that could be “light” or “glow.” Something that could have been “room” or “hall,” depending on context. Several repetitions of what she suspected was a title.

  Thalen’s, most likely, she supposed.

  It wasn’t enough. It was barely even the start of enough. But it was a crack in the stony vault of ignorance. A sliver of understanding. The first inklings of insight. Lira had had to tug her away in the end, fingers gentle but firm around her wrist.

  “You can’t read anything if your eyes fall out,” she said when Irena protested. “Come and eat. Then you can stare at your wizard scribbles until your brains leak out tomorrow.”

  “That is not an encouraging metaphor,” Irena muttered, but let herself be led downstairs anyway. Her legs complained with every step. The near-fall’s bruise made itself known as a deep throb along her side.

  In the kitchen, the hearth was down to embers. Lira coaxed it back to sullen life and set a pot over it. The smell of thin stew and toasted crusts filled the room, humble and grounding. Irena sat at the table and only then noticed the sting in her palms.

  She turned her hands over. Tiny splinters had embedded themselves along the base of her fingers and in the fleshy heel of her thumb, stark little black lines against reddened skin.

  “Hmph,” she intoned, scowling at the reminder from the wood of its assault on her person.

  “Let me see,” Lira said.

  She abandoned the stew long enough to fetch a small needle and a clean rag from her stores. Then she sat opposite Irena and reached across the tabletop, her expression settling into a frown of concentration.

  “Give me your hand,” she said.

  “I am not an invalid,” Irena objected. “I can—”

  “Use both hands to treat your own palm?” Lira looked pointedly from Irena’s hand to her eyes. “Needle and pull without stabbing yourself half to death?”

  “…No,” Irena admitted.

  “Then give me your hand.”

  Irena huffed but obeyed, palm up.

  Lira’s fingers were warm and calloused where they wrapped around her wrist. The steel of the little needle caught the firelight as she set the tip gently against the first splinter.

  “This will sting,” she warned.

  It did.

  Irena clenched her jaw as Lira teased the tiny sliver of wood free. The pain was sharp but fleeting, more insult than injury. Elsewhere, she could feel bruises blooming purple and yellow under her skin. Throbbing and aching as she tried to sit back in her seat.

  She’d had worse, probably. Though in her cushioned life as a princess, she couldn’t remember when that might have been. And here she was, now, with no gaggle of attendants clucking around her with salves and cloths. No perfumed healer murmuring about precious royal hands. Just a halfling girl with a scrap of steel and steady patience, pulling out the tower’s teeth from her skin one by one.

  While Lira worked, Irena talked.

  “I believe it to be a spell,” she said, voice hitching slightly as another splinter came loose. “Or… no. A ritual, more likely. There are verbs in there that don’t look like the simple ‘do this, then that’ of household charms. It is rather… structured. There is one line that seems to set the place—some sort of hall. And another that keeps repeating references to strings. Notes. Light.”

  “Notes?” Lira echoed. “Like a song?”

  “Like music,” Irena said. “Perhaps. Or like instruments. Putting it there in the hall, I am almost sure of it.” She flexed her fingers instinctively; Lira tightened her grip to keep her still. “And the sigils sit at particular points in the text, as if they’re controlling different aspects of whatever’s happening. It feels… very deliberately designed. Very complicated. Far more complicated than sheet music would be.”

  “So you think it makes… what? Music? Lights?” Lira worried her lip between her teeth as she pried at a deeper splinter. “Or… or it fills the room with eyes?”

  “Why would anyone fill a room with eyes?” Irena demanded, appalled. “Where did you even get that idea?”

  “I don’t know what wizards think is reasonable,” Lira said. “You’re the one who wants to be one.”

  “I want not to be trapped,” Irena said. “If learning how to fill a room with eyes helps with that, I suppose I shall take it. If it turns out the scroll is just instructions on how to make your own fireworks for feast days, I shall be somewhat less impressed. But, again, and I really must stress this, I have not seen a single mention of eyes.”

  Lira snorted again. “You’d still try it.”

  “Of course I’d still try it. A woman in my position can hardly afford to turn her nose up at explosives.”

  “Or an extra pair of eyes.” Lira eased out another splinter. Irena swore under her breath.

  “But it could be more than that,” Irena went on, her thoughts tumbling out now that she had started. “It could be… a way to disrupt the ward. Or redirect it. If whoever wrote this used the same underlying structures that Thalen used downstairs and on the perimeter of the tower, there shall be a shared design language. Patterns in the text. Once I know those, I might get some inkling of how the wards work.”

  “And then what?” Lira asked. “You rub them out? Draw new ones over the top?”

  “I do not know,” Irena said. “Yet.”

  Lira huffed. “You said that before.”

  “Well, it is true,” Irena said, and was suddenly aware of how different “I don’t know,” and “I can’t” felt from “I don’t know, yet.”

  “The scroll is not just some locked door to prise open for answers. What is written there is a key in its own right,” Irena said. “I merely have to discern what that key unlocks, which is more than I could say about anything else in this cursed place.”

  Lira’s fingers were still busy treating Irena’s hand. “Hold still,” she murmured.

  Irena tried. Each little sting brought her back from the dizzy heights of possibility. But even wincing, she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice.

  “And what if it is a spell?” she said. “Imagine. Magic that obeys your words. Objects moving where you tell them, or… Well, even if it does nothing to the wards, even if it proves to be nothing more than some gaudy spectacle… that is still… something I can create. In a place where everything else is something I must endure, this…” She flexed her fingers again as another splinter came free. “This could be mine.”

  Lira’s face was turned down, her brow furrowed over the task. The candlelight picked out the fine lines of strain around her eyes, the faint signs of fatigue.

  “You sound almost happy,” she said quietly.

  “I am not happy,” Irena said, too quickly. “I am… interested. Engaged.”

  “Excited,” Lira offered.

  “Yes,” Irena admitted. “That, too.”

  Lira finished with the last splinter and sat back, blowing out a breath. Tiny slivers of wood lay on the rag, defeated.

  “There,” she said. “Open and close them for me.”

  Irena did. Her palms stung, but the sharp pain was gone, replaced by a dull ache.

  Lira’s work was neat. No unnecessary cuts. No fuss.

  “Thank you,” Irena said, grudgingly sincere.

  Lira’s cheeks coloured, but she quickly turned away and started cleaning away the rag and needle. “It’s nothing,” she mumbled. “You’d have done the same for me.”

  “Possibly,” Irena said. “But I expect I would have made a worse job of it.” She picked up her spoon and stirred her stew without really looking at it. “Whatever that script is, whatever those sigils mean, I am going to pull it apart until it makes sense,” she said, more to herself than to Lira. “At least one thing in this thrice-damned tower is going to do what I want, for once.”

  Silence settled between them for a heartbeat, smothering. When she glanced up, Lira was looking at her.

  There was fear in the halfling’s eyes still; that wary superstition hadn’t gone anywhere. But under it, there was something else. A small, fierce spark of… approval. A kind of fragile pride that Irena was only just beginning to deserve. And under even that, deeper and more nebulous, something unshaped. Something that might, one day, be named.

  “I hope so,” Lira said. Her voice was very quiet. “Anyway, we’d better make sure you have everything you need… I think we have supplies for letter writing in one of the crates.”

  She dropped her gaze back to her bowl at once, as if she’d said something too bold without meaning to. The tips of her ears had gone pink.

  Irena, tired and aching and half drunk on the idea of magic bending to her will, didn’t notice the extra weight in the look. She only registered that Lira was, for reasons entirely her own, willing to help her. She smiled, a small, crooked thing, and picked up her spoon properly.

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “We start tomorrow. We shall need more light in the library. Candles. Oil, if the baron’s stooges remembered to send any. And I shall have to scrape together everything I can remember from Master Hegal’s lectures about the second and third reform…”

  Lira made a face. “You’re going to recite at me, aren’t you?”

  “Until you beg for mercy.”

  “That might not take as long as you think,” Lira said, and the corner of her mouth turned up, just a fraction, into a smile. Irena couldn’t help it. Her smile widened, too.