So she’d tell again the story of their favourite pastime: midsummer ice-skating. How Thalia would appear at Euterpe’s bedroom door on the hottest days of the year, holding two pairs of bladed white boots, and would drag her downstairs past their amused parents and out to the moat. There, Thalia would anchor her sister, while Euterpe leaned out from the bank and dabbled her fingers into the water. A few tingling moments later it would be frozen down to its bed like thick green glass, and the girls would lace on their skates and spend the August day swooping up and down on the cooling ice.
As Silyen continued to visit, though, he stopped asking for these childish recollections. Euterpe noticed physical changes in him, too. He grew taller. During several visits his voice squeaked, then one day he spoke to her in a man’s tones.
Time must be passing, and Euterpe sometimes wondered how it was that so little had happened in her own life. Her sister’s marriage hadn’t yet taken place, nor did her own wedding to darling Winterbourne get any closer.
She never saw anyone to ask them why that was, though. And whenever she tried to work things out herself, it all became more confused, not less. An ache would swell at the back of her head. It was simpler just to sit and enjoy the breeze, watching the butterflies and wondering where on earth naughty Puck had hidden himself.
She and Silyen fell into a routine. They would walk round the garden and moat, where it was always sunny and warm. Then they’d go indoors and her visitor would sit at the great library table going through some book or another that he’d picked from the shelves. Euterpe would settle into a window seat with a novel or sketchbook.
Her family was never around during Silyen’s visits. She would have loved to present him to Thalia, who she knew would be as amazed as she was at how much this strange young man resembled them both. And it was such a shame she hadn’t been able to introduce him to Winterbourne either.
The man she had set her heart on was exceptional, gifted, she told Silyen proudly. He had been top of his year at Oxford and was now at the start of what she knew would be a brilliant legal career. Winterbourne was fascinated by politics, but as a second-born would never sit in the House of Light.
Silyen had smiled at that, and offered the observation that Winterbourne would make a fine Chancellor. And Silyen also knew – everyone did, he said – how very devoted Zelston was to Miss Euterpe.
One summer afternoon a little while after – and how long this summer had been – Silyen closed the book he was reading. He sat back in the library chair, raised his arms above his head and stretched. It was the unmistakable behaviour of someone who has completed either a demanding race or a demanding book.
‘Finished?’ she asked.
‘Finished all of them,’ Silyen said, flexing his fingers. Euterpe heard the fine bones crunch, like a bird in Puck’s little jaws. ‘That was the last.’ He pushed the book away from him.
‘The last?’ Euterpe scoffed. ‘Not even a bookworm like you could have read everything this library contains. You’re giving up. I don’t blame you – that one’s rather boring.’
‘So I gathered,’ Silyen said. ‘You only managed to get halfway through the first chapter.’
Euterpe looked at him in astonishment.
‘How on earth do you know that?’
Silyen held up the book, open at the first page. There was the engraved frontispiece, all in Latin. It proclaimed the text an eighteenth-century Dutch treatise on the use of Skill for the conjuration of trade winds to the Indies.
It was the book that had inspired Harding Matravers’ infamous voyage, Euterpe remembered. She’d thought it might be exciting but it had proved tedious in the extreme. She’d persisted for a few pages, attracted by the author’s account of the isle of Java, but had abandoned the volume once it turned technical. Her family had a reputation for scholarship, but Euterpe had never been interested in the workings of Skill. The great power she sensed in herself frightened her and she used it as little as possible.
Silyen was turning the book’s pages, each covered in thick type so heavy it was deeply impressed into the paper. Then suddenly there was no more lettering, just blank, yellowing quires of paper. Euterpe blinked in surprise.
‘You stopped here,’ Silyen said. ‘Page . . .’ – he turned back to the last printed sheet – ‘twenty-three. And this one you never read at all, did you? Such a shame.’
He reached across the table and pulled towards him a handsome, heavy volume bound in green leather. The lettering on the spine was in Ancient Greek – a language Euterpe did not understand, though she recognized the book itself. She had never even opened it.
‘The title says it’s about whether certain Greek myths are accounts or allegories of Skill,’ the boy said. ‘Sounded intriguing, but—’
He fanned open the book. There was nothing printed inside it. Every page was blank.
‘All these books,’ he said, frustration evident in his tone. ‘Lost to the world once, and now lost again, to me.’
What did he mean? Euterpe stood up and went to the table to examine the volume.