by JA Andrews
Steffan ran his thumb over the corner of the remaining pages. “We considered it.” His voice was more somber than she’d expected.
“Well, I’m thrilled!” she said, trying to bring back his enthusiasm. “I’ll read it as soon as you finish. Mikal has been assigning me the driest books ever written. It will be a joy to read something interesting.”
“Ah, you should find something more fun than this to read,” Steffan said, while Nikolas finished coughing with a fit that shook his thin body. “What do young people read today?”
“I have no idea what other young people read. The Shield has me researching Mallon, which is thoroughly depressing, so I try to supplement all that with happier stories before bed. I’ve found some fascinating ones about female Keepers. Alaric also sent me two books on anatomy so I can learn more about how the body works and maybe ways I can help it heal.”
She finished her bread and stood, stepped around the table until she was next to Nikolas. “Speaking of healing…”
Clearing their lungs of the fluid that built up in them each day was simple. Their bodies were already working on it every moment of every day, they just didn’t have the strength to make headway. All their bodies needed was a little help. It would take mere moments to give them relief and keep them from getting any sicker.
Instead of leaning forward in his chair as he usually did, Nikolas leaned back and looked at his twin.
Sini paused. “Do you want me to start with Steffan?”
“There’s only seventeen pages left,” Steffan said gently.
Sini glanced between the two of them.
Nikolas gave his brother a pointed look. “You’re being too vague.”
Steffan sighed. “We only have seventeen pages left before we are done with our work, my dear. So there’s no need to clear our lungs anymore.”
Sini’s chest gave an uncomfortable lurch. “What does one have to do with the other?”
“You’ve been such a help to us.” Nikolas turned in his chair to face her. “Without you, we certainly wouldn’t have finished.”
“Might not have made it past King Torroluuna,” Steffan gave a wheezing laugh. “How would the world have survived without knowing about his pet squid?”
Sini didn’t laugh. “Gringonn has nothing at all to do with your health.” Her voice was sharper than she meant it to be. “Now which of you is going first?”
Nikolas reached out for her hand and Sini let him take it. His fingers were like leather, dry and a little cool. She had the urge to snatch her hand back.
“We owe you a tremendous debt, my dear.” Steffan’s face held a smile, but his honey-brown eyes were watery behind his spectacles. “All we’ve ever wanted was to finish the book. Before you came, we thought we wouldn’t have time.”
Nikolas was smiling at her too, a sad sort of smile that asked her to listen. But she didn’t want to listen. Not to this.
“Seventeen pages won’t take us long at all.”
“All simple things too. No complicated coups or military maneuvers. Just a few weak kings and the spread of the bandit lords.” Steffan set his hand on the book. “We’ve got plenty of time for that.”
Sini pulled her hand away from Nikolas and crossed her arms. If she stopped healing them, nothing would happen immediately. Their lungs would fill slowly, and infection would certainly come, but it might be weeks, or a month before…
She shook her head. “There’s a lot more to life than writing books.” She’d meant to sound forceful, but her voice quavered with something that sounded much more like fear. A tightness climbed up her throat and she funneled it into a glare before it could come out as tears. “It’s the simplest thing in the world to treat your lungs. Let me heal you. Maybe after you’re done with these seventeen pages we could do something crazy. Like have breakfast near the window,” she gestured to the side of the room. “Or if we’re feeling really adventurous, maybe a picnic out in the grass.”
The twins were quiet for a moment, and while they didn’t look at each other, she couldn’t escape the feeling that they were agreeing on something.
“A picnic would be a lovely way to celebrate finishing,” Steffan said at last.
The agreement had a ring of finality to it.
“Will you let me clear your lungs?” she asked quietly.
The two men shook their heads.
“Don’t worry, Sini,” Nikolas said. “We’re not going to disappear today.”
“We do have seventeen pages left,” Steffan agreed.
Sini moved back to the front of the table and sat. The old men turned back to their bread. Sini fiddled with a piece of crust on her plate. The room was stuffy and none of the breaths she took felt deep enough.
Nikolas watched her. “We’ve ruined breakfast, haven’t we?”
“More than breakfast, I think,” Steffan set his bread down and the two men waited for Sini to talk.
“If you have seventeen pages left,” she said finally, biting back any tears and using her most matter-of-fact tone, “then at least let me work on your hands. There’s no reason for those to be stiff.” She took Steffan’s gnarled hand gently in hers and traced pink runes above his knuckles. The old man let out a quiet sigh and stretched his fingers. She healed the other three hands that waited for her. She held the last one for an extra moment, but couldn’t think of a single thing to say to them. She picked up her own plate, not bothering to wait for them to finish, needing to get away just to breathe. When she got to the door she looked back at the old men, who were watching her sadly.
For a moment she couldn’t get the words out. Finally she whispered, “Don’t write too fast.”
Chapter Three
The twins’ news twisted in her gut like a knot. They couldn’t do this. She clenched her hands on the railing outside their door, staring down the tower.
The Shield.
She half-ran down the ramp. Everyone listened to the Shield. He’d been the leader of the Keepers for nearly eighty years, voted into that position when the last Keeper died. Surely he could change the twins’ minds.
His door was open but his room empty, which wasn’t surprising. The Stronghold was bright with morning light now, and she crossed the wide floor and into the library. She leaned over the railing to see down the four stories to the swirls of color on the tiled floor far below. Books lined the round walls. Most of the levels below her lay in shadows.
“Shield?” Sini called out, her voice reverberating in the quiet library.
Someone hissed for her to be quiet, and Mikal’s head appeared above her, peering disapprovingly down at her from the next level. Two floors higher than him, just under the glass roof, an old, wrinkled hand waved over the railing. Sini ignored Mikal and the reminder that she still hadn’t turned in her research and ran up the ramp that spiraled between the levels. She reached the top breathless and almost crashed into a small step ladder spread across the aisle.
The Shield was perched on the top of it with a book spread open on his lap. “Good morning, my dear.”
“The twins want to die,” she blurted out.
He marked his place with a finger and turned to look at her fully. The Shield was the oldest of the old men in the Stronghold. Gerone figured he must be one hundred and thirty by now. He was also the only Keeper shorter than Sini. When she found him standing, which wasn’t often, he barely came up to her shoulder. The top of his head was completely bald, as though years ago all his hair had climbed down and gathered into great tufts of eyebrows. There was nothing old about his gaze, though.
His customary warm smile settled into something more sorrowful.
“They only have seventeen pages left.” Sini came in closer, throwing the words at the Shield.
The old man sighed. “A great accomplishment.”
“No. It’s just a book. And they say that this close to the end, they don’t need—” The tightness in her throat cut off the last words.
He gently closed the book on his lap
and tucked it back into the shelf. Climbing down from the ladder, he gestured to two nearby chairs tucked into a windowed nook. Sini grabbed the pillow off one and hugged it to her chest.
The Shield sat, scooting back into the chair and leaving his feet hanging above the floor. “For them it’s not just a book.”
“I know.” Her voice was still too sharp. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to calm down.
“Do you know much about their childhood in Gringonn?” At the small shake of her head, he continued. “Their parents originally lived in Greentree, but, tempted by the promise of a market for their wool, they moved their family to Gringonn and proceeded to lose every bit of money they had.”
Light from the window spread across her lap, and Sini picked at a thread along the edge of the pillow. “Sounds depressing.”
“That’s the way with facts, isn’t it? They can sound so bleak. Regardless of what happened during those years that looks so unfortunate from afar, Nikolas and Steffan developed a deep love for that land. Those twins have a way about them, don’t they? I’ve never met a single person who didn’t like them, and I’ve known them for almost ninety years. We’re still feeling the benefits of relationships they made during the two decades they lived at court, even though most of the people they knew there died years ago. The twins were so well-loved that people’s children and grandchildren are fonder of the Keepers because of them.
“In Gringonn—even as children—they befriended farmers, shepherds, milkmaids. Everyone from small local leaders to bandits. Even one up-and-coming warlord. And they found enough fascination there to fuel a lifetime of research into a country everyone else overlooks.”
The Shield waited for her to say something, but she couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for Gringonn this morning. The country was overlooked because it was dull. The monarchy was so weak it was constantly overrun by one of the dozens of equally-weak, squabbling warlords. But the royal family was so enormous that there was always another cousin who could step in and take back the throne. No one had enough power to actually take charge, though, and the history of the country was nothing but a muddled mess of petty coups and frail restorations.
Of course, none of this had anything to do with Gringonn. Sini took a deep breath. Where is the real pain? The twins would ask her. What’s sitting beneath the anger and all the swirling demands?
“But why…” She cast about for her real question. “Why does finishing the book mean they’re done with…”
There was the pain. It was childish and selfish, and tears pushed their way into her eyes. She wanted to say breakfast. “Everything else.”
“It is everything else,” the Shield answered, his words sounding as if he meant breakfast, “that has convinced them to stay long enough to finish.”
Sini shook her head and gripped the pillow. Her chest didn’t want to breathe right.
“By the summer you came to us, I thought the twins wouldn’t last until the midwinter feast. You’ve been a miracle to them, my dear. None of the rest of us could have kept their lungs as healthy as you have. The way you interact with a body—you have a skill few Keepers have ever possessed. A skill I never thought I’d see. The twins certainly never hoped for someone like you.”
Sini dashed the tear from her cheek. Then another. “And what was the point of healing their lungs for four years? To finish a book that only they care about?”
“Certainly not,” he answered gently. “The book was merely a timeline.”
What was that supposed to mean?
“You could continue healing their lungs for a long time, could you not?”
She nodded. The fix was so simple.
“But you must understand that every morning you heal them, and every afternoon the fluid begins to seep in again. By night they are in pain and cannot escape the truth that their bodies are worn out. Every day they go from being healthy to dying.”
Sini drew back. “They never told me that.”
“Because every day they decided it was worth it.”
“For a book?”
The Shield raised an eyebrow. “Have you ever asked them how their day was?”
“Every morning. They tell me what they wrote the day before, or little stories about when Mikal and Gerone were young. Or funny things from their days at court.”
The Shield nodded. “I suppose that is what they’d tell you. I often take my evening tea with the twins. There’s a leaf Alaric brought back from Napon that has pain-deadening properties, and I like to make sure it’s measured properly into their drinks.”
“I could have come by in the evening and helped with the pain,” she protested. “No one ever told me they needed it!”
“The tea was enough.” The Shield gave her a smile. “Do you know what they tell me when I ask about their day?”
She picked at the loose thread on the pillow. “That they’re miserable?”
The Shield laughed. “I’ve never heard either of them complain of that. They tell me about their breakfast with you.”
Sini snapped her gaze up to the Shield. He looked serious.
“They talk about their hopes for the Keepers now that you have come. About how they never imagined living to a time when they could meet a Keeper who would breathe new life into this old place. Who would breathe new life into them.”
Sini stared at him. “Then why stop trying now?”
“They needed a timeline, an end point when they could stop fighting against their bodies. Everyone’s life has an ending. Not too many people get to choose it as they have.”
“But they’re still writing—they’re almost done. They could take some time off. Do something else for a while.” Keep having breakfast. “Finish it later.”
“By my calculations, if they had kept writing at the speed they are capable of, they should have finished that book a year ago.”
The words sank into Sini slowly. “Maybe they write slower because their hands hurt,” she whispered.
The Shield shook his head. “Their hands have bothered them for twenty years.” The Shield reached out his own small, knobby hand and set it on Sini’s knee. “They aren’t leaving in spite of you, Sini. They’ve stayed this long because of you.” The Shield let out a snort. “They certainly didn’t need another year to talk to me.”
Sini’s gaze traced a barely perceptible crack along the joint in the stone wall next to her. She should feel grateful, somehow, for the Shield’s words. There was a truth to them. But mostly they made her feel alone and brittle, as though she was riddled with hair-thin cracks of her own.
The Shield let her sit in silence for a few minutes.
She smoothed the pillow out on her lap. “I still don’t like it.”
“Neither do I. But since it isn’t up to you or me, we must find a way to settle with it.”
The thought of the twins was too painful. She pushed it away, looking for something to distract her. The Shield had papers filled with his thin, slanting script and precisely drawn diagrams spread out along the base of the bookshelves. She picked up a stack piled next to her chair and flipped through it, breathing in the smell of paper and ink.
The library roof again.
Above them, the blue cloudless sky was visible through a starburst of glass panes that spanned the library. The eight trigonal roof sections outlined by dark wooden beams met at a diamond of glass. The overall impression was of an eight-pointed star shooting off sparks of light in every direction, frozen before they could rain down on the books below.
The little old man was obsessed with the idea that the glass roof of the library, which had covered the seven stories of books for hundreds of years, was no longer good enough. He was too well respected for anyone to point out that this strange new fixation didn’t warrant as much time as he gave it. Too respected for them even to point it out to each other when he wasn’t around. But it was notable that no one ever join him in his work unless he specifically asked.
The Shield turned toward the w
indow they sat next to, his eyes troubled under his explosive eyebrows. He was such a strange little man. Somehow, sitting there surrounded by the stone of the wall, the dark shelves of books, and the fall of the light through the roof he worried about so much, he seemed more like part of the building than a person inside it. For a moment she thought she saw something like tendrils of light swirling out from him, climbing along the stones of the window frame like a vine.
She blinked and it was gone.
“Changes are coming,” he said, almost to himself.
She leaned forward. “What’s coming? Can you see the future?”
“I’m not sure the future is seeable. But when you’ve paid attention long enough, you start to feel when changes are stirring.” He turned back to her, his eyes suddenly sharper. “Can you feel it?”
She pulled back a little at the intensity of his expression. “I don’t think so.”
He made a disappointed noise.
Running her fingers over the papers on her lap, she pushed the next question out. “Do you know how long the twins have?”
The Shield’s gaze shifted back to the sky. When he spoke, his voice was heavy. “I do not.” With a heavy sigh, he scooted off the chair, grabbed a small pile of books and inspected their spines. “It’s a mercy they reached this point before you left.”
The page she held slipped out of her hands and she snatched it up before it could fall. Cold fingers of fear wrapped around her. “I’m leaving?”
“It feels that way.” The Shield looked out the window beside them with a sorrowful expression.
She clenched the papers on her lap. The idea was appalling. “I can’t leave. I have…” Rett and her studies and she didn’t even know how to find Lukas yet. “Too much to learn.”
“I feel the same way. Too much to learn.”
Sini set the pages down on the pillow and tried to smooth out the creases she’d left along the edges. The familiar view of the valley outside caught at her heart. “Do I have to leave?”