It did, and she was more than willing to show me the way. It was in a disused wing of the palace up many flights of stairs and amounted to no more than a large room with shelves piled with books, scrolls, and maps without any organization whatsoever. A square table was surrounded by three legged stools in the center of the room. A high, circular window let in light. Dust motes floated in the air as we pushed the door open. The serving girl wrinkled her nose.

“Hope this is alright,” she said, pulling out a handkerchief.

I stepped into the room, into the warmth of the afternoon sunlight and took a deep breath.

“It’s perfect,” I said.

It was a pleasant, warm afternoon in the King's Library many years earlier, a few years into my service, and I was making my way through Wills, Deeds, Property, and Taxes. It was not a busy part of the collection. Few guests spent much more time than it took to realize what was housed on those stacks before turning back to greener and more interesting pastures. I supposed I had probably spent more time in the section than any living soul. As a section, it had its advantages. It was very large and required most of a day, and I was left unbothered and alone for the entirety of that day more often than not. It was a welcome time to meditate, to contemplate whatever had been on my mind lately as I dusted the scrolls and books that were opened so infrequently that I almost felt bad for them. On the day in question, I had a conversation with Febril on my mind. It was an argument of sorts, though not aggressive enough to earn the ire of his wife or children, who had been in his house at the time as well. They were used to our spirited discussions and it was not out of the ordinary for us to disagree. As close as we were, Febril was not my father. While we had similar childhood experiences, what we took from those experiences was as different as could be.

“What do you mean you don’t believe in it? You joke with me about this, but I tell you it isn’t funny.”

“I’m not making a joke, Feb. I don’t believe in it.”

“But fate is what led you to where you are today. In the library. How else can you explain it?”

“I finished school and applied to the Head Librarian to become an apprentice duster and I was accepted.”

“You make an old man sad, Ori. Yes, of course you did all that, but don’t you see the points which led you there? You happen to go on a trip. You happen to meet the duster who is passionate about his work. You feel a kinship with him. Then you make the decision to go and apply to work.”

Febril was the only person I told about the old man I met on the orphanage’s trip to the library. I left out my suspicions that the man may have been either a ghost or a figment of my imagination. Feb would have enjoyed that too much.

“I just don’t see a distinction. I was the one who took that and chose to do something about it. You’re not any different. You should know better than anyone. Look at your business. You made this,” I said.

He shook his head and took a sip from his mug of coffee, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“The bread called to me, boy. The way the books called to you. The siren song of the loaves brought me to the orphanage’s kitchen and I’ve been with them ever since.”

His willingness and even desire to give up ownership of the events in his own life was infuriating to me and I was certain we would never agree on the topic. On the day in Wills, Deeds, Property, and Taxes, months had passed since that conversation, but it’s where my mind was drifting for a specific reason. Earlier that morning, I was deep in thought, lost in a daydream of my father. These daydreams had lost their sharp edges over the years, so I no longer dreaded them, but welcomed them in long old friends. My father was reading to me from the fairytale where the knight was given the choice to speak or die. It was always one of my favorites because it made so little sense to me, but it seemed to make sense to my father. That type of reading was magical because I knew the gap would close and some day it would mean something to me too. This daydream was interrupted when a large book from a high shelf came tumbling down and landed on its pages between the stacks. I descended my ladder to find the book and determine if it was damaged or if I could return it to its proper place and see if there was a reason for the fall.

Once down, I picked up the book and found…the fairytale of the knight. I was not unaware I was cleaning Myths and Legends that morning, but the collection contained thousands of volumes. Straight from my mind to the library floor, as if I had summoned it and it had fallen at my command. I stood with the book in my hands, and read

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

I pray you sweetheart, counsel me whether it is better for a man to speak…or die?

I understood it at that moment for the first time. I knew what the story was telling me, what my father had known and I had not, because I had not been old enough yet to have felt the weight of words unspoken, the drag on your soul of what you must say, or write. Words that must come out or you will…die.

And so, later that afternoon I found myself in the warmth and silence of an abandoned section of the library, questioning my own assurance that my life was my own, and there was anything I could control. I had been so certain only hours before that fate was the comfort of an old man, a safe harbor for minds unwilling to contemplate difficult truths. But here was my beloved library, conspiring to make me believe that the world was listening and leading me along a path that was not of my choosing. Yes, I now contained the knowledge to understand the old fairytale, but it had decided to put it back in front of my eyes so that I could do so. I don’t know if I started believing in fate that day, and I never told Febril of the experience, but he must have noticed a softening of my position in our debates, of a new openness I displayed to a fortuitousness of the world we could not control.

In the cramped library room of the palace at Singhal, I was alone and I soon found the old tower was drafty and I longed for my “Desert” getup which was in the trunk back in my quarters below. There was nothing but old coals in the fire grate and no stacked wood or kindling. This was not a room that was used by many or very often. Still, I found myself surrounded by my old friends, and I needed them. I found several tomes I was familiar with and spent a happy hour reading collections of old tales that changed through the years, but the bones of which remained the same generation after generation. After my pleasant detour, I called for a fire to be made and for a mug of coffee. I was going to get down to brass tacks and take a look through what they had to offer.

The shelves were jumbled and so I began sorting them on my own as best I could, creating stacks on the table in the center of the room so that I could section off all the texts in common speech and reshelve them in an order that made sense. This activity combined with the warmth of the room and the strength of the good coffee brought up, warmed me inside and out. I used this organizing time to peruse what they had on offer. Even as early in the Empire as I was at the moment, the paltriness of the collection seemed unacceptable to me. I won’t say I was surprised, because Everard was not a man who read books, that much was clear, but it saddened me all the same. I was distrustful of people who had been given the education to read, but chose not to.

There were some histories and some personal accounts, and stack after stack of recollections of various battles. Having only been in one skirmish, I was not an expert on warfare, but as far as I could tell, all descriptions of battles were the same and reading one was as sufficient as reading them all. I also found tales for children as I mentioned, and farming guides all thrown together. I remedied that. Before it felt like I had blinked, it was late into the night, the fire was burning low, and I was forced to light a candle to continue my work. I was not hungry or tired at all. I was living on coffee and the thrill of the work. I had not realized how much I missed my purpose. Adventuring and intrigue and battles and riding horses were all well and good, but I was a library man and I had been taken out of my natural habitat. In the tower room I was thriving on the task at hand.

But like the book falling from the stacks that day all those years ago, the world has a way of intruding on our reveries, of bringing us back from our little daydreams when there’s work to be done. And there was certainly still work for me to do in Singhal. I was enjoying not thinking about it for awhile, but it was always there, just beneath the surface. The world came back to me not long after I had finished the last of the coffee. The dregs had been cold and I had brought the tin near the fire for a few moments to heat it to a reasonable temperature before swilling the last gritty bits down. Returning to the shelves, I decided to tackle a tangled section of scrolls on the bottom shelf nearest the table I had not yet touched. I moved the nearest stool so I could sit on the floor with my legs crossed and begin to unroll the scrolls one by one to see if they shared any common threads or were as haphazard in their location as the rest.

It was not the first scroll I opened (A bill of sale) or the second (A treatise on Wormwood) which brought me back to earth. It was the third. At first, I was unsure what I was reading. There was no signature or date and it was written in a looping hand with a quill with a deteriorated nib, giving the text an uneven and blotchy look. There was no indication if the story was true or for entertainment only. I read on. It told of a group of women bathing in a stream. They washed each other's hair and used river stones to scrub themselves down. It was straightforward in its descriptions, neither flowery nor sensual. A recitation of facts only. The women, clean and naked, layed down on the soft moss by the side of the stream to dry in the late morning sun. Two of the women fell asleep, but the third remained alert, listening to the burbling of the water and the twittering of the birds, and the chittering of ground animals fighting over seeds and nuts.

It was she who noticed them, though she had not heard them approach. There were people across the stream, at least a dozen of them. Like her, they were naked. A few carried sticks in their hands, but otherwise they were as if the forest had summoned bodies from the ground. The third woman wondered if she was going mad and woke the other two. She whispered to them to ask if they could see them too? But by the time she had woken them up and they all looked across the stream together, the people were gone.

And so began the myth of the Bali, river spirits that watched over the bathing women of Singhal. The scroll continued, and had a dozen or more similar accounts of mostly women, bathing naked in streams and coming into contact with “spirits” that watched over them but did not hurt them or attack them or even approach them. They were guardians of nakedness. Fully alert to what I was reading, I searched for any indication of when this had been written. It was evident to me from my experience in the library that it was old, and if any of Everard’s men had been aware of the myth, it would have come up, but I needed something to bring to Edouard because it was clear from the moment I realized who the scrolls were about what this was.

A bargaining chip.