Bound to the Fallen King

Chapter 5: The Archive

The library at Ashveil occupied the whole of the castle's north tower, five floors of shelving stacked so high that the topmost books required a ladder on runners to reach, and it was there, on the second week of my first month, that Instructor Aldric sent our lore class to research the very thing I had come to Ashveil to learn to kill.

"Choose a bestiary entry," he said, handing round a list of names with the brisk indifference he brought to everything. "Prepare a report on its known habits, its known weaknesses, and should you be fortunate enough to survive an encounter, how you would confirm a kill. Two weeks. Use the archive. Use each other, if you must."

I did not need to consult the list to know which entry I wanted. I had known the name for a year, turned it over so many times in the dark that it had worn smooth in my mind the way river stone wears smooth under water. I found it near the back of the list, printed in Aldric's neat, unbothered hand, and felt something in my chest go very still and very cold.

Vaskir-class demons. High-tier. Rare.

I did not choose it. Choosing it would have meant explaining, and explaining was not something I was prepared to do in a room full of strangers, however many weeks I'd shared lore lessons with them. I chose instead a lesser entry: a marsh-wraith, common enough to have a dozen confirmed kills on record already, and told myself the research would be useful regardless. I did not entirely believe myself.

The archive, when I found my way to its relevant shelves that evening, was nearly empty. Most of the first years had scattered to easier corners of the library, drawn by entries with shorter reading lists and less unsettling illustrations. I was grateful for the solitude until I turned a corner near the bestiary's oldest volumes and found I did not, in fact, have it.

Thorne sat at a low table near the tower's narrow window, a single candle burning beside a stack of books I recognized, with a small drop of my stomach, as belonging to the very section I'd come to avoid.

"Didn't peg you for the type to choose the hardest reading," I said, before I could think better of it, more to fill the silence than out of any real desire to speak to him.

"I didn't choose it." He didn't look up from the page in front of him. "Aldric assigned it. Apparently I test well on things most people find difficult." Something dry entered his voice, not quite a joke, not quite not one. "A curse, some might say."

I sat, against my better judgment, in the chair across from him, drawn by a curiosity I recognized as unwise even as I gave in to it. "What entry?"

He turned the book so I could see the illustration, old, hand-inked, faded with age, depicting a tall figure wreathed in something that might have been smoke or might have been shadow, its features deliberately obscured by whatever artist had rendered it centuries ago, as though even in a book, some things resisted being looked at directly.

Vaskir-class demons. High-tier. Rare.

The same entry I had turned away from an hour earlier.

"Interesting choice," I said, and was proud of how level my voice came out.

"Aldric's choice," he corrected. "Not mine." He studied me for a moment, something unreadable in his expression, the candlelight catching his eyes at an angle that made them look, for one disorienting instant, darker than dark, black enough that I found myself unable to look away, the way you can't look away from a held breath waiting to break. "You look like you recognize the name."

"Everyone recognizes the name. High-tier demons aren't exactly common conversation, but they're not secret, either." I kept my voice light. I did not know, then, whether I succeeded.

"That's not what I asked."

I met his eyes and, for one unsteady moment, considered telling him the truth, Tomas's name rising in my throat like something long buried finally working its way to the surface before some old, careful instinct closed my throat around it instead. I had told almost no one at Ashveil why I'd come. I was not prepared to make Thorne, of all people, the exception.

.

"It's a hard entry," I said instead. "That's all."

Something in his face shifted not disappointment, exactly, though something adjacent to it, gone as quickly as it appeared, replaced by the same careful, unremarkable calm he wore like a second skin. "Fair enough."

We worked in silence for a while after that, the candle burning lower between us, and I found myself, more than once, watching him without meaning to the careful, economical way he turned pages, as though he'd read the text before and was confirming rather than learning it; the stillness that settled over him when he thought I wasn't looking, so unlike the restless energy of every other first year I'd met. I told myself I was cataloguing evidence, the same careful method I'd have used tracking any dangerous thing. I was not entirely certain, by the time the candle guttered low enough that we both rose to leave, that cataloguing was all I'd been doing.

At the tower's stair, he paused, and for a moment I thought he might say something further, some continuation of the conversation we'd both, by unspoken agreement, let drop. Instead he only said, "You're a careful researcher, Marchetti," in a tone I couldn't quite place, somewhere between compliment and warning.

"I have my reasons."

"I don't doubt it." Something almost gentle crossed his face then, brief and startling in its sincerity. "For what it's worth, whatever you're looking for in that entry. I hope you don't find it."

He was gone down the stairs before I could ask what he meant by that, and I stood alone in the tower's cooling dark for a long moment afterward, the marsh-wraith's entry forgotten in my hands, turning his words over and over without arriving anywhere close to an answer I trusted.

I did not sleep well that night. I told myself it was the reading.

I was becoming, I thought, watching the candle gutter out entirely in the room I'd finally returned to, altogether too skilled at telling myself things I didn't believe.