But I, too, was desperate. And I had come to find him for a reason.
“Mother might try to send you away, but it’s not really up to her.” I shuttered the lantern once more, until it barely emitted the faintest trickle of light. “Still, you have a point. If tonight is all we have, then let’s not waste it.”
His eyes widened and my neck heated as I realized too late how my words would sound. I didn’t know much about the physical relationship between a man and a woman, but Mother had taken the time to explain the basics to me. And somehow I instinctually guessed his mind had gone there, because I was pretty sure that act was something couples engaged in at night.
“To learn about the Paladin,” I rushed to add, flustered. You’re doing this all wrong! “I was going to take you to the library.”
“Really?” Halvor’s entire face changed, lighting up with such anticipation that I could feel it radiating from him. “There’s an entire library?”
The relief from his response was like having a weight you didn’t even know was resting on your chest lifted; I could suddenly breathe deeper, my blood felt somehow lighter in my body. Maybe I wasn’t quite as terrible at conversing with a strange boy in the dark as I’d first believed. “Yes, but we have to be quiet. Do exactly as I do, and if you hear someone coming … well, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.” I turned and beckoned him. “Follow me.”
He didn’t question my warning, though his eyebrows lifted as he fell into step behind me. I hurried back the way I’d come, my stockings stained brown from the dust when I glanced down at my feet. The air grew charged as we moved silently and swiftly through the citadel, as if it were coming alive somehow—unfurling from a slumber that my mother had placed it under with a lifetime of rules and restrictions that I was breaking.
I’d never dared spend more than a minute or two in the library, fearing her reprisal if she caught me. Most of the books were written in Paladin anyway and the few in my language I’d managed to sneak out had rarely been helpful, other than the one about the different kinds of rakasa—the monsters that the Paladin had fought and driven back into their world, saving ours. But the idea had come to me and I’d seized it. Surely a scholar could be plied to share what he knew with endless shelves of books—even if they were in a foreign language.
At the bottom of the stairs I paused, head cocked, before creeping the opposite direction from the dining salon, kitchen, and morning room. We passed the grand ballroom that was still draped and unused beyond massive double doors; they were heavy enough that I hadn’t been able to push them open until I was nearly thirteen.
Our destination was the southernmost wing of the citadel where all of the rooms that fascinated me most—and were the highest on my mother’s absolutely forbidden list—resided. The room with the massive circular table and chairs of varying sizes and shapes. The room with yellowed maps tacked on the walls, their edges curling like a witch’s nails, and rows of desks with dozens of locked drawers. The library full of shelves, heavy with books coated in dust and grime, parchments that hadn’t been moved in over a decade, and brocade drapes that were pockmarked with moth holes. And finally the mystery room that comprised the farthest corner of the citadel.
The citadel had been constructed all the way at the very edge of the cliff it sat on, so that the southern wall hovered directly above the steep drop-off and the waterfall that crashed to the valley floor far, far below, as if the mountain had been spliced, part of it ripped away and destroyed. The doors to the hall were even heavier than those to the ballroom. I’d tried to open them many times with no luck. Until last year, when I’d finally managed to get one to start moving, and discovered the doors were not only heavy, they were also loud, scraping and groaning open, like a great beast waking. Loud enough to alert my mother to what I’d done. I only caught a brief glimpse of soaring ceilings and a wall made of windows through the crack I’d managed to create before the sound of boots clacking against the stone hallway preceded Mother’s shout: Don’t open those—whatever you do, leave those doors shut! I’d expected her fury, but that came later; first, there was only her sheet-white face drained of blood and her winter wind–chilled hands grabbing mine, yanking them from the door handle, and the bone-deep groan of effort it took for her to push it back, throwing her entire body against the thick wood until the narrow band of discovery I’d managed to procure shut off again with a resounding thunk. She was silent the entire awful march to my room, and only once that door was safely shut behind us did the color return to her cheeks, simultaneous with her wrath spewing from her mouth in the form of nearly unintelligible screaming, while I cowered on my bed. I was locked in my room and given only one meal a day for four days to prove her point of how dangerous, how wrong I’d been to try and open that door. Worse than the lack of food was the separation from Inara. I’d been forced to watch her work in her garden from my window, my cheeks damp and my heart hot with anger, with my own fury. But her methods, though harsh, were effective. I’d only dared return to the mysterious doors once, during a thunderstorm at night, when she was asleep and I could mask the echoing groan of their movement with the rumble of thunder.
But instead of trying to pry them open once more, I’d only stood there in the dark, my hand splayed on the door. The storm had been so close I’d felt the thunder rumbling through the wood beneath my fingers. Stronger than my curiosity was the memory of watching Inara from my room, unable to speak to her, to explain why I had suddenly disappeared. Eventually, I’d returned to my room, defeated by my mother even in her sleep.
With every door we passed as we hurried toward the southern wing, Halvor’s curiosity grew stronger, until it hummed through the space between us, a thread of energy that made my own heart ache with all that I didn’t know, all that I wished to know. My need for that knowledge was my only claim to fire; not visible in my eyes like Inara’s, the flame of my desperation was known to no one but me. But, oh—how it burned, turning my blood hot as we finally reached the library and I stopped.
Halvor wasn’t looking at the entrance to the library, though; his gaze was fixed on the double doors at the end of long corridor—or more specifically, the plaque above the doors.
“Hall of Miracles…” he muttered, so low I barely caught the words, but they turned the fire in my veins to an inferno.
“You can read that?” I hadn’t even realized I’d grabbed his arm until he startled. He looked down at my fingers clutched around his wrist and I immediately released him.
He whispered back, “Of course … can’t you?”
I shook my head.
Halvor seemed about to say more when the citadel groaned around us. His mouth snapped shut as he glanced up in alarm. The noises the slumbering beast made at night—when the wind pushed at its stone walls and scraped at the glass windows, making it rattle and moan—were still unnerving for me, and I’d lived there my whole life. Halvor paled, the bump in his throat moving when he swallowed.
Motioning for silence, I handed him the lantern. I quickly worked to open the door, then ushered him into the library before following and closing it behind us.
Whatever fear he may have felt moments earlier must have fled in the presence of the grandeur before him. When I faced him, his mouth was hanging slightly open, his hands slack at his side, barely managing to keep hold of the lantern that had slipped dangerously low on his fingertips. I snagged it moments before it would have fallen to the ground, possibly shattering and setting the room ablaze.
“Oh.” He shook himself as if coming up from a dream. “I apologize, it’s only … this place…”
“I know,” I agreed, because truly, I did.
Moonlight filtered in through the two-story-high windows that flanked shelves even taller than Halvor, illuminating the hundreds of books that stood like small sentinels in rows upon rows upon rows all round us, guardians of knowledge—right there, so close—and yet impossibly distant because I couldn’t read most of them.
But Halvor—perhaps he could. Somehow he had read the plaque.
“How did you know what it said?”
Halvor glanced over his shoulder as if his vision could pierce through the door now separating us from the unfamiliar markings that I had spent hours staring at above the other, larger doors.
“I told you my Master and I studied the Paladin … that included learning their language. At least, to the best of our ability with our limited resources.”
“You can read their language?” I breathed.
Halvor’s brow creased. “Can you not?”
I looked down at the lantern I clutched. “No.” That one word contained a world of shame and desperation. Another mark against me in his book.
“Zuhra, I have to be honest with you. I don’t understand anything that has happened today. I keep trying to figure what all of this means”—he lifted his arms in a circle, encompassing the library, the citadel beyond, most likely even me and my family in their rooms far away—“but every time I think I’ve started to put a few pieces together, they change on me and I find myself more confused than before.”
I was silent.
“What is this?” he pressed. “Why do you live here—and how do you control the hedge? Is it Inara? Does she choose who stays or who goes? How can she be your sister when she is a Paladin—when she even has an accent—and you … do not?” I flushed, but he continued before I could respond. “Why can’t you read their language when you live in their home? Why am I here and Master Barloc out there somewhere, suffering … perhaps even…”
“I’m certain he survived,” I assured him when he trailed off.
Halvor half choked on a noise that resembled a laugh but that lacked all humor. “You’re ‘certain he survived,’” he repeated when I stared at him, bewildered. “Do you not understand the absurdity of such a statement? We’re scholars, not explorers or … or … warriors or some nonsense like that. There was never supposed to be a question of survival!”
As he spoke, his words grew not only in pitch, but also in volume.
“Ssh.” I pressed my finger to my lips and waved him away from the door. Though Sami had assured me Mother would sleep soundly through the night, part of me still feared the creak of her footsteps outside the shut door. It was difficult to believe a woman as indomitable as she could be susceptible to something so mundane as a sleeping draught slipped into her nightly tea.
Halvor sighed, but followed me deeper into the room, toward the windows that overlooked the last of Inara’s gardens and the hedge beyond. From this vantage point, we could see where it ended—abutting the southern edge of the citadel that jutted out above the cliffside.
The Paladin had built the edifice so that the south wall was flush with the edge of the cliff it sat upon. I thought of the glimpse I’d had of the “Hall of Miracles”—if Halvor had read the plaque correctly—through that cracked door last year. I’d also seen it depicted in a large painting in the hallway near the morning room, but the scene was from the outside, as if the painter had been a bird, hovering above the cliff, looking in through the two-story windows—or a Paladin riding a gryphon. I’d often stood in that hallway, imagining I stood inside the painting, behind those windows, staring down at the abyss directly below me, my head swimming with fear and a sudden surge of adrenaline. It had been exhilarating and horrifying to imagine; all too easy to picture the pane of glass shattering beneath my hands and falling, falling, falling to smash on the rocks at the bottom of the waterfall that were obscured by mist in the painting. But here, in the library, if the hedge hadn’t been there, rather than the terrifying drop-off, we would have been able to see the trail winding down the mountainside to the valley below and Gateskeep nestled there at the base of the mountain.
We both looked silently out at the grounds for several long moments, washed milk-white by the moon, and when I finally spoke it was to our reflections in the window.
“My father was a Paladin. And I didn’t realize … I didn’t know how dangerous it must have been for them … But my mother … she really did love Adelric. I know she did—she loved him fiercely.” Once the words began, I couldn’t stop them; the secrets and memories flowing out of me faster and faster with each one shared. Yet another dam inside me broke, torn down by the upheaval of Halvor Roskery showing up in our garden—and my life. “She loved him enough to marry him, to leave her family, and follow him here. We were both born here. But the night Inara … the night my mother began to labor … he left us. He disappeared when Mother needed him most.
“And then Inara was born with her burning eyes, and that hedge trapped us here, and my mother hates him now—hates all the Paladin and anything to do with them. I’m forbidden to come here, to come in any of these rooms. But all I want is to understand. I want to know who they were—what that makes me. What it makes Inara. I want to know … I … I…” And suddenly I was sobbing, choking and empty, and all my secrets and my loneliness and my hopelessness strangled me, frost-coated fingers of desperation clenching tighter and tighter, squeezing the air from my lungs until I was gasping. And Halvor—poor, unsuspecting Halvor—he stared at me, bewildered. This was not what he’d expected when I’d offered to bring him to the library. He’d expected books, answers, knowledge.
I needed to stop—had to stop—before I frightened him irreparably. But I couldn’t breathe—couldn’t see through the tears that I’d held in for months, years—
“Zuhra.” His voice was quiet, a low note to the noise of my despair. “It’s all right.” I barely even realized he’d moved toward me until his arms hesitantly came round my body. I stiffened immediately, my sobs shocked into stillness. He froze—but didn’t let go.
A hug. He was hugging me.
I started crying again, but this time it was the soft rain after the violence of a lightning storm, a gentle washing away of the tumult that had seized me before. Slowly, gradually, I let myself breathe, let myself relax into the comfort of touch—of arms that tightened slightly, gathering me closer. This veritable stranger, who had unwittingly been trapped here with me, was offering something I had no recollection of having been given before. At least, not since the night Inara was born.
When I had finally regained control of myself, I pulled away and he quickly released me to take a step back, his eyes shadowed in the moonlight as he studied my face.
“I’m sorry,” I managed to croak. My neck and cheeks were warm with embarrassment, but the rest of my body felt hollowed out, drained to the point of being chilled.
“There is no need for your apology.” He shook his head, ringing his hands in front of him as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them now that we’d broken apart. “It is I who should ask your forgiveness. I shouldn’t have pried … I had no idea…”
“You couldn’t have known. And you have every right to ask questions.”
“So … the hedge … none of you can control it?”
“No.” I stared out at our hulking captor. “I know it sounds ludicrous, but somehow it’s … alive. Not the way other plants are, but the way you and I are. You saw what it did today—how it closed off, how it attacked your master. Whenever any of us have tried to leave, that’s what it does. Except for Sami. She’s been allowed to leave before.”
“She has?”
I nodded.
“But then … she came back?”
“I don’t know why. If I could leave, I would never return. But yes, she’s always come back.”
“Even if the hedge only let you leave and kept Inara here? Would you go?”
His question was a sharpened blade, carving through my certainty; my silence was answer enough. He was right—the only way I’d truly leave was if Inara was with me. And now, after what he’d told me tonight, I didn’t know if I’d even dare go then—to risk her life for freedom.
After a long, uncomfortable pause, Halvor looked down at his hands and said, “I’m sorry he left you. And I’m sorry you’ve been trapped here your whole life. If th
ere is anything I can do…”
“You believed yourself to be our hostage moments ago, and now you are offering to help me escape?”
“Well … yes?” He shrugged sheepishly.
An unexpected burble of mirth rose within me, escaping my lips with a lightness that carried away some of my sorrow, especially when Halvor’s responding chuckle joined my own. Within moments, we were both laughing uncontrollably, until my stomach ached, and my lips hurt from smiling, and the empty, cold space within me shrank slightly, the chill receding in the wake of the warmth of burgeoning friendship.
That’s what this was—wasn’t it? Smiling, talking together—laughing together? He was my first real chance in eighteen years at having a friend.
I was pitiful.
The laughter trailed off as I shook my head ruefully. “Honestly, I don’t know how you could help, though I appreciate the offer.”
“Perhaps we can find an answer here—together. There is nothing like it in the rest of Vamala, so the hedge must have been planted by the Paladin. There has to be a way to escape … or destroy it.”
“If there is, I haven’t been able to discover how—and neither has anyone else who has tried.”
Halvor stared out the window, as if hoping for the beastly plant to reveal its secrets to him by sheer will power alone. “Your sister … Inara … she has Paladin power,” he mused haltingly. “That’s the only explanation for her glowing eyes. Perhaps she is the answer.”
“Inara obviously inherited some of my father’s power, but I honestly have no idea what she is truly capable of … or what he was capable of doing either, for that matter.”
Halvor glanced out the window, to the grounds below. “Did they fly here?”
His question took me off guard and it took me a moment to realize he meant my parents. “I … I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I’d often stared at the depictions of Paladin on their gryphons and wondered if my father had been one of them … if my mother had ever ridden on one. But it was a question I’d never dared ask. And I’d certainly never seen any evidence of a gryphon living in the citadel during my lifetime. The stables were in total disrepair, full of rodents and cobwebs.
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