Chaol wasn’t hiding from his father. He wasn’t hiding from Celaena. And he wasn’t hiding from his men, who now felt some ridiculous urge to look after him.
But the library did offer a good amount of refuge and privacy.
Maybe answers, too.
The head librarian wasn’t in the little office tucked into one of walls of the library. So Chaol had asked an apprentice. The gawking youth pointed, gave some vague directions, and told him good luck.
Chaol followed the boy’s directions up a sweeping flight of black marble stairs and along the mezzanine rail. He was about to turn down an aisle of books when he heard them speaking.
Actually, he heard Fleetfoot’s prancing first, and looked over the marble rail in time to see Celaena and Dorian walking toward the towering main doors. They were a comfortable, casual distance apart, but … but she was talking. Her shoulders were relaxed, her gait smooth. So different from the woman of shadow and darkness that he’d seen yesterday.
What were the two of them doing here—together?
It wasn’t his business. Frankly, he was grateful that she was talking to anyone, and not burning her clothes or butchering rogue assassins. Still, something twanged in his heart that Dorian was the one beside her.
But she was talking.
So Chaol quickly turned from the balcony rail and walked deeper into the library, trying to shove the image from his mind. He found Harlan Sensel, the head librarian, huffing and puffing down one of the main paths through the library, shaking a fistful of paper shreds at the air around him.
Sensel was so busy cursing that he hardly noticed when Chaol stepped in his path. The librarian had to tilt his head back to see Chaol, and then frowned at him.
“Good, you’re here,” Sensel said, and resumed walking. “Higgins must have sent word.”
Chaol had no idea what Sensel was talking about. “Is there some issue that you need assistance with?”
“Issue!” Sensel waved the shredded papers. “There are feral beasts running amok in my library! Who let that—that creature in here? I demand that they pay!”
Chaol had had a feeling that Celaena had something to do with this. He just hoped she and Fleetfoot were out of the library before Sensel reached the office.
“What sort of scroll was damaged? I’ll see to it that they replace it.”
“Replace it!” Sensel sputtered. “Replace this?”
“What, exactly, is it?”
“A letter! A letter from a very close friend of mine!”
He bit back his annoyance. “If it’s just a letter, then I don’t think the creature’s owner can offer a payment. Though perhaps they’d be happy to donate a few books in—”
“Throw them in the dungeons! My library has become little more than a circus! Did you know that there’s a cloaked person skulking about the stacks at all hours of the night? They probably unleashed that horrible beast in the library! So track them down and—”
“The dungeons are full,” Chaol lied. “But I’ll look into it.” While Sensel finished his rant about the truly exhausting hunt he’d gone on to retrieve the letter, Chaol debated whether he should just leave.
But he had questions, and once they reached the mezzanine and he was certain that Celaena, Fleetfoot, and Dorian were long gone, he said, “I have a question for you, sir.”
Sensel preened at the honorific, and Chaol tried his best to look uninterested.
“If I wanted to look up funeral dirges—laments—from other kingdoms, where would be the best place to start?”
Sensel gave him a confused look, then said, “What a dreadful subject.”
Chaol shrugged and took a shot in the dark. “One of my men is from Terrasen, and his mother recently died, so I’d like to honor him by learning one of their songs.”
“Is that what the king pays you to do—learn sad songs with which to serenade your men?”
He almost snorted at the idea of serenading his men, but shrugged again. “Are there any books where those songs might be?”
Even a day later, he couldn’t get the song out of his head, couldn’t stop the chill that went up his neck when its words echoed through his mind. And then there were those other words, the words that had changed everything: You will always be my enemy.
She was hiding something—a secret she kept locked up so tight that only the horror and shattering loss of that night could have made her slip in such a way. So the more he could discover about her, the better chance he stood of being prepared when the secret came to light.
“Hmm,” the little librarian said, walking down the main steps. “Well, most of the songs were never written down. And why would they be?”
“Surely the scholars in Terrasen recorded some of them. Orynth had the greatest library in Erilea at one time,” Chaol countered.
“That they did,” Sensel said, a twinge of sorrow in his words. “But I don’t think anyone ever bothered to write down their dirges. At least, not in a way that would have made it here.”
“What about in other languages? My guard from Terrasen mentioned something about a dirge he once heard sung in another tongue—though he never learned what it was.”
The librarian stroked his silver beard. “Another language? Everyone in Terrasen speaks the common tongue. No one’s spoken a different language there for a thousand years.”
They were close to the office, and he knew that once they arrived, the little bastard would probably shut him out until he’d brought Fleetfoot to justice. Chaol pressed a bit harder. “So there are no dirges in Terrasen that are sung in a different language?”
“No,” he said, drawing out the word as he pondered. “But I once heard that in the high court of Terrasen, when the nobility died, they sang their laments in the language of the Fae.”
Chaol’s blood froze and he almost tripped, but he managed to keep walking and say, “Would these songs have been known by everyone—not just the nobility?”
“Oh, no,” Sensel said, only half-listening as he recited whatever history was in his head. “Those songs were sacred to the court. Only those of noble blood ever learned or sang them. They were taught and sung in secret, their dead buried by the light of the moon, when no other ears could hear them. At least, that’s what rumor claimed. I’ll admit to my own morbid curiosity in that I’d hoped to hear them ten years ago, but by the time the slaughter had ended, there was no one left in those noble houses to sing them.”
No one, except …
You will always be my enemy.
“Thank you,” Chaol got out, then quickly turned away, walking toward the exit. Sensel called after him, demanding his oath that he’d find the dog and punish it, but Chaol didn’t bother to reply.
Which house did she belong to? Her parents hadn’t just been murdered—they were part of the nobility who had been executed by the king.
Slaughtered.
She’d been found in their bed—after they’d been killed. And then she must have run until she found the place where a Terrasen nobleman’s daughter could hide: the Assassins’ Keep. She’d learned the only skills that could keep her safe. To escape death, she’d become death.
Regardless of what territory her parents had lorded over, if Celaena ever took up the mantle she’d lost, and if Terrasen ever got to its feet …
Then Celaena could become a powerhouse—potentially capable of standing against Adarlan. And that made Celaena more than just his enemy.
It made her the greatest threat he’d ever encountered.