“You’re mistaken,” she said and wondered how much longer her knees would support her. “I’m terrified of you.”
“Do you mock me?”
She shook her head hastily, her eyes wide.
His lips closed over his jagged teeth, and for an instant his face looked almost human. “Hmm,” he grunted, then stepped back, apparently no longer angry. He gestured at the desk, took a heavy volume from a nearby table, and tossed it her way. Leta caught it against her stomach, nearly dropping it but managing to keep hold.
“Start reading,” Corgar said and took a place in the dark corner by the door.
Leta spent the whole of the next three days poring over books and scrolls, sleeping only when she dropped from exhaustion. Corgar had quickly realized that she wasn’t a particularly skilled reader, and she half wondered if he would kill her when he found out. But he didn’t. In fact, when she confessed her lack of experience, he said nothing, only shrugged and indicated she should continue.
Now her eyes burned and the lighting was poor, for no candles were lit and the sky outside the window was thickly overcast with a winter storm rolling in. She could not guess the hour. It might be morning or late afternoon. She felt caught in a half-lit world without time.
And always below her in the courtyard were the ringing of demolished stone and the cracking of whips.
Groaning, she lowered her forehead onto the page over which she labored, a chronicle of taxes collected three decades ago and written in old Raguel’s hand, which was far more difficult to decipher than the Chronicler’s.
Weary, her head heavy with unshed tears, she looked across the desk at a piece of torn parchment, one of the scrolls Corgar had damaged in his rage that first day. It was nothing of significance, another nursery rhyme written as an afterthought and stored away. But she pulled it closer now and read with some relief.
“Starlight, star bright, guide her footsteps through the night.”
She smiled and traced the familiar shape of the Chronicler’s handwriting. Even if he was dead and gone, at least part of him would live on through this labor to which he had devoted himself: the chronicling of life, from taxes to nursery rhymes.
She shivered suddenly, for the room was bitterly cold. It had taken her most of a day to convince the goblins, who didn’t feel the winter’s bite, that she needed candles to see by and a fire to keep her limbs from numbing. Even now, with a small blaze on the hearth across the room, she felt cold through and through, and not even the Chronicler’s writing could warm her.
Inside her bodice, down near the waistband of her tattered gown, rested Mintha’s key. Leta placed a hand over her stomach, feeling the secret contours of that object. Why had Lady Mintha given it to her?
“I don’t get it, Ghoukas.”
The voice sent a chill down Leta’s spine. It was one of the two guards posted outside the library door. The library itself had no lock to keep her imprisoned, so Corgar posted a constant watch. For the most part they were so quiet that Leta could forget they were there. But every now and then they spoke to each other in their growling voices.
“I don’t get it. Is it pretty?”
The other guard, the one called Ghoukas, snorted. “I haven’t regarded pretty or ugly in a hundred years. What does it matter?”
But the first one was dissatisfied with this. “Why else would Corgar value it so?”
They must be speaking of the House of Lights, Leta thought, still fingering the shape of the key inside her gown.
“Corgar doesn’t care about pretty, no more than any of us,” Ghoukas responded.
“Then there must be something else,” said the first one, sounding truly mystified. “I’ve never seen our captain become enamored of anything, not treasures, not gems, not even our own queen. Why would he take it into his head to fancy a mortal girl?”
A weight dropped like a stone in the pit of Leta’s stomach.
Hardly aware of what she did, she slid from the Chronicler’s stool, stumbling across the floor into the deeper recesses of the library. There was nowhere to hide in this small chamber. But she fumbled for the spiral stairway leading to the loft and climbed partway before her knees gave out and she sat down hard.
You should probably dissolve into a lump of panic, one side of her mind whispered, and Leta, for once, had difficulty deciding if it was her practical or rebellious side speaking.
No! her other side snarled, and she shook her head. You’re not giving in. He’s waiting for you to collapse! But you’re not what they’ve told you that you are.
“Think, Leta. Think,” she whispered. It probably wasn’t true, what the goblins were saying outside. Probably nothing more than confused gossip. “But you can’t stay here and let him destroy you,” she told herself. “You’ve got to act. You’ve got to do something.”
Her hands, pressed against her roiling stomach, felt the key.