“Just when I thought I had a firm grasp on demonology,” Quin said, “turns out I should have been brushing up on my angelology all along.”
Mia was thrilled Quin and Domeniq were getting along so famously, but at the moment she had more pressing concerns. Her body was raging with the heat, her thoughts a fraying thread that might snap at any moment.
“I thought I was going to meet Zaga,” she said.
“Patience never was your strong suit, was it, Mia?” Sensing he’d found a more willing audience in the prince, Dom led him down a corridor, with Mia following reluctantly behind.
The hallway opened into a gigantic room with vaulted ceilings and magnificent archways, all carved from glittering vermilion.
Then she saw them: the strange shapes lying twisted on the floor. Human shapes.
“Those are our forebears,” Dom said. “Buried in ash and perfectly preserved.”
This wasn’t a sanctuary. It was a crypt.
Mia knelt beside one corpse. It was a girl—she could tell from the soft curve of her young breasts, the lines of her dress frilled at the ankles. She was tucked into the fetal position, her arms shielding her head.
Quin crouched beside her. “I don’t understand how they’re preserved so well.”
“I read about this,” Mia said quietly. “In the last pyroclastic surge from a volqano, fine ash rains down and encases people’s bodies. The shell is porous, so as their bodies start to decay, the soft tissues leach through. But by then the ash is already hard as rock, so not only are their skeletons still inside, their shape is permanently preserved. They’re captured in their final postures—exactly the way they were when they died.”
She shuddered. How awful, to be trapped forever in this moment of death.
Dom said, “If you’d rather see something else, Your Grace . . .”
“You don’t have to call me that, you know. ‘Your Grace.’”
Mia’s head raged with heat and pressure. She felt as if the volqano had resurrected its fiery ash and brimstone inside her skull.
“Could we maybe not stay in this room of preserved dead people?”
“We’re standing in the cradle of civilization,” Quin said, “and you want to leave?”
“You don’t have magic stabbing you in the head.”
She heard footsteps and wheeled around. Pilar was standing beneath a carmine arch.
“She’s ready for you now, Rose.”
Mia was happy for the interruption. The boys would be fine on their own—Quin seemed enraptured with the history lesson, and Dom was all too pleased to give it.
As she followed Pilar into the mouth of a lava tube, Mia’s capillaries felt plucked and ripe, ready to burst. The inside of the tube was duller than the outside, coarse gray and brown rock, and darker, too. Pilar struck a torch against the stone and it roared to life as they slipped through a labyrinth of passageways.
“Here.”
Pilar stopped in front of two giant doors hewn from the rock, buffed and polished to a fine glint. Mia saw her reflection, carved into pieces by the volqanic glass, her body shimmering and sliced.
She reached for the doorknobs—two carved talons—and hesitated.
“You’re not coming?”
Pilar shook her head.
Mia’s skin was tingling. She felt the same rightness she’d felt at the waterfall and again in the hot air balloon, a sense of inevitability nudging her forward. She grabbed the talons and pushed.
The doors swung open onto a gargantuan room lit with candles and torches from floor to domed ceiling. Mia half expected a pipe organ to strike up an orchestral fugue. On the far wall, a tiny waterfall burbled into a silver basin, identical to the one she and Quin had jumped into, only in miniature. Beside it, a red hot air balloon puffed up and down on a piece of twine.
She inhaled sharply as the doors closed behind her. She wasn’t interested in the waterfall or the balloon; it was what graced the other three walls that held her attention. This room wasn’t an empty cave. It was her favorite thing in the world.
A library.
Chapter 38
Bare
LEGIONS OF BOOKS LINED every wall.
They were grouped by color: crimsons bleeding into rusts, rusts to roses, roses to creams. They easily numbered in the tens of thousands. The shelves were sculpted into strange shapes, and the books themselves became the art: swooping in concentric circles, extending into tiered wings, sweeping into spiral staircases. There were stacks that looked like pyramids and a tall ship with billowing book sails.
Mia had grown up with a respectable collection—and the library at Kaer Killian was nothing to sniff at—but she’d never seen anything like this.
She was in bliss. Her headache faded as she walked the perimeter of the room. She ran her finger down spines, devouring titles like sugared fruit. What a Witch Was. Mythologies of Magic. The Anatomy of Desire: An Introduction.
There were titles in Pembuka and Luumi and dialects she couldn’t even begin to guess. And of course books in Fojuen abounded. One caught her eye: Zu Livru Dujia (The Book of Magic). Maybe the truths in this book would actually be true.
Carefully she slid the tome off the shelf. It was very old, the pages rough and weathered at the edges, the spine clinging by a few thin threads. She traced the words on the cover, merlot against vanilla custard.
“So you have chosen.”
Mia startled and dropped the book. It was a woman’s voice, low and haggard with the consonants bitten off at the ends. The accent she couldn’t quite place.
Mia blinked into the dark recesses of the room, the places where the candlelight could not reach.
“I can’t see you,” she said.
“Why do you assume you need to see?”
Mia stooped to get the book.
“Leave it,” the voice said.
“But I—”
“You chose this book, why?”
“Because I want to learn the truth about magic.”
“Your magic?”
“Yes. Well, all magic.” She swallowed. “Are you Zaga?”
The woman didn’t answer. When she spoke again, her voice had shifted subtly; it seemed to be coming from a different corner of the room.
“You do not want to learn magic. You want to control it.”
Mia wasn’t sure what to say.
“You, Mia Morwynna Rose, do not read books to learn the lessons therein. You read them to master them.”
Her cheeks burned. “How do you know who I am?”
“I know a great deal about you. I know where you come from and why you have come. I know you are not a true student of magic.”
“How can I be a true student of magic? I’ve never studied it!”
“Yet you want to.”
She hesitated. The strange voice was right; the moment Mia walked into the library, she had forgotten all about her mother’s murderer. All she’d wanted was to curl up with a good book and throw open the windows in her mind.
“I’d like to debunk the lies I’ve been told my whole life, yes. But that’s not why I’m here.”
“That itself is a lie. You lie to yourself. You are desperate to learn about magic.”
Mia shielded her eyes with her hand, thinking she saw a shape materialize by the toy waterfall. But there was no one.
“You’re Zaga, aren’t you?” Silence. “Why can’t I see you?”
“And still you think you need to see. You are unable to trust things your eyes cannot behold, truths your mind cannot parse for instant meaning. Yet you think you are ready to learn magic.”
This was maddening. Mia didn’t want to talk in circles with an invisible woman. She needed answers, not more questions.
She took a breath. “Who murdered my mother?”
“One more answer you are eager to claim as your own. You covet knowledge the way others covet power or wealth. You seek a prize to be worn around your neck. Knowledge is something to be stalked and subdued, then displayed like a trophy.”
“If that means finding my mother’s murderer,” Mia said sharply, “then yes. I’ll stalk all four kingdoms to find her. Heart for a heart, life for a—”
“Life. Yes, I know. If you want answers, maybe you should read your book.”
Mia stooped, picked up the book, and pried it open to the very first page. Scarlet ink curled and beaded at her fingertips.