“No, I mean those potatoes are all the food you have. If we eat them, you’ll be left with nothing.”
“Oh, well.” He shrugged off the comment. “I’ll manage somehow. Don’t worry about me,” he said optimistically.
Hadrian retrieved the bag, looked in it, and then handed it to the monk. “There are only eight potatoes in here. How long were you planning to stay?”
Myron did not answer for a while, until at last he said to no one in particular, “I’m not going anywhere. I have to stay. I have to fix it.”
“Fix what, the abbey? That’s an awfully big job for one man.”
He shook his head. “The library, the books. That’s what I was working on last night when you arrived.”
“The library is gone, Myron,” Royce reminded him. “The books were all burned. They’re ash now.”
“I know. I know,” he said, brushing his wet hair back from his eyes. “That’s why I have to replace them.”
“How are you going to do that?” Alric asked with a smirk. “Rewrite all the books from memory?”
Myron nodded. “I was working on page fifty-three of The History of Apeladorn by Antun Bulard when you came.” Myron went over to a makeshift desk and brought out a small box. Inside were about twenty pages of parchment and several curled sheets of thin bark. “I ran out of parchment. Not much survived the fire but the bark works all right.”
Royce, Hadrian, and Alric shuffled through them. Myron wrote with small meticulous lettering, which extended to the edge of the page in every direction. No space was wasted. The text was complete, including page numbers not placed at the end of the parchments but where the pages would have ended in the original document.
Staring at the magnificently rendered text, Hadrian asked, “How could you remember all of this?”
Myron shrugged. “I remember all the books I read.”
“And did you read all the books in the library here?”
Myron nodded. “I had a lot of time to myself.”
“How many were there?”
“Three hundred eighty-two books, five hundred twenty-four scrolls, and one thousand two hundred thirteen individual parchments.”
“And you remember every one?”
Myron nodded once more.
They all sat back, staring at the monk in awe.
“I was the librarian,” Myron said as if that would explain it all.
“Myron,” Royce suddenly said, “in all those books did you ever read anything about a place called Gutaria Prison or a prisoner called Esra … haddon?”
Myron shook his head.
“I suppose it’s unlikely anyone would write anything down concerning a secret prison,” Royce said, looking disappointed.
“But it was mentioned a few times in a scroll and once in a parchment. On the parchment, however, the name Esrahaddon was altered to prisoner and Gutaria was listed as The Imperial Prison.”
“Maribor’s beard!” Hadrian exclaimed, looking at the monk in awe. “You really did memorize the whole library, didn’t you?”
“Why ‘imperial prison’?” Royce asked. “Arista said it was ecclesiastical.”
Myron shrugged. “Maybe because in imperial times the Church of Nyphron and the empire were linked. Nyphron is the ancient term for emperor, derived from the name of the first emperor, Novron. So, the Church of Nyphron is the worshipers of the emperor and anything associated with the empire could also be considered part of the church.”
“That’s why members of the Nyphron Church are so intent on finding the heir,” Royce added. “He would be their god, so to speak, and not merely a ruler.”
“There were several very interesting books on the Heir of the Empire,” Myron said excitedly. “And speculation as to what happened to him—”
“What about the prison?” Royce asked.