She covered her mouth for a short moment but did not giggle at Edouard’s nakedness. For his part, the Prince stood proud and straight and nodded at Elisha’s entrance through the door to my quarters. She and I would be needing to have a talk about how she was getting into my quarters unnoticed.

“I wanted to wish you good luck, my lord,” she said, her voice even. Not many men would do such a thing.”

“Thank you, Elisha. I esteem your judgment.”

Coming from most nobles, Edouard’s words would have seemed a reprimand meant to sting, but my Prince was true in his praise of the formidable stable girl. We followed him only as far as the palace doors. It was dawn, but a visiting Prince strolling naked through the winding streets of Singhal was still to be avoided. A covered wagon waited for him there to take him past the gates and on his way. Mist hovered above the ground and made him look like a saint in a painting, wreathed in white. He put both hands to my head and whispered in my ear.

“Keep them safe.”

“Keep yourself safe.”

“I have all I need,” he said, tapping the side of his skull.

Elisha and I watched as he climbed into the wagon and it began its descent through the city streets to the main gate of Singhal. The wilderness awaited. The spirits awaited. Most of the palace was still asleep, but I waited until Elisha and I were back in my quarters to ask how she continued to appear in my room without notice. She leaned back on the door as it closed behind us and laughed.

“What do you mean?”

“I lock that door,” I said, pointing. “And I’m tasked with keeping Prince Edouard’s…valuables safe while he is gone. So if there is a breach in security to these quarters I need to know about it.”

The answer turned out to be much more straightforward than I could have imagined. From within her apron, she withdrew a jingling set of keys and I caught them. Except, they were not keys. The thin pieces of iron were not cut to a lock, but were reedy and of various sizes. I looked up from the keys to the girl in disbelief.

“You pick the lock?”

She nodded.

“Dead simple, these locks.”

“If you were caught.”

“I can take care of myself, Master Ori.”

Her pronunciation of master had nothing of the respect her words had held for Edouard.

“I have lived a life before you two dropped from the sky,” she said. “I have had reasons more prosaic than whatever magic you two possess for wanting to get in or out of locked doors.”

There was an edge to her voice. I had hit closer to a nerve than she preferred. I repeated my concern and begged her to be careful lest she get herself in trouble.

“And you,” she added. “You believe I would give you up.”

“I…don’t know,” I said. “I value honesty so I’ll tell you that. You deserve it. I don’t know you well enough to trust you with my life. But I’ll have to.”

“Good enough,” she said.

She asked if I required anything else from her and I told her I did not. I intended to return to the tower library room to see if there was more of value to be found there. She turned on her heel and closed the door in total silence behind her. It occurred to me that she may be right about taking care of herself. Still, her spying held lives in the balance. I took several deep breaths as I imagined Edouard on his way, his lithe nakedness striding through the chill. There had been concern about the weather that he shrugged off.

“They’ve survived centuries this way. If I can't present myself on their footing, the journey has no point.”

I prayed for his warmth or his resilience, whatever worked best, as I made my way back to the tower library, the signets cold against my chest as I walked, a reminder of the burden I now carried for us.

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When I first discovered the impressions scored into the iron of the stack ends on the twenty eighth floor, I was not certain if they were part of the organizational system or not. There were a few reasons for this. First, chronology is the easiest way to organize, whether it’s chronology of publication or chronology of topic of discussion in the case of an entirely historical set of volumes, which I was confident the twenty eighth floor was by this time. So, why the need for engraved emblems? Did each emblem represent a specific event in the timeline on that particular row? It was possible, but the images were too vague to make solid connections. One stack end’s symbol was a tree. It was too small of an engraven image for me to make out even what type of tree it might be, so I could not see what purpose that might serve.

I went as far as bringing clay from the riverbed and making impressions of each, carefully depositing them in my robe pocket and bringing them home, my garret window and the sun an imperfect kiln. But studying them as three dimensional images did not further my understanding of them either. They were interesting objects, but they told me nothing. I lacked sufficient information to make an educated guess as to their purpose. My real breakthrough came, as so often happens, when I was not thinking about them at all. I was in my chair near the lion signet impression, reading about the Empire’s conquering of the Tag-Allik tribe. The Aliks were fearsome water peoples, inhabiting islands in a series of lakes in the far East. They were known for their ability to hurl javelins from their moving longboats and for their skillful navigation in those boats, the rowers in total unison, the javelin throwers on their raised platforms steady as if standing on unmoving stone. I looked up from the text, rubbing at my eyes and the lion impression caught my eye.

I noticed something I had never noticed before. It should have been obvious, from everything I knew about the library’s long history including its time before the Empire, but it took this moment of reading fatigue to make it clear. My eyes rested on the impression for a minute before I realized what I was noticing. The difference. The impressions, which I would so much later learn were portals to be activated by signet rings, they were not original. It was so obvious when I got down on my knees and put my nose to the iron itself. All my studying and making of impressions and idle wonderings and it had been right in front of me the entire time. The discoloration of the iron was not the same. The iron inside the impression was much less blackened with age than the stacks themselves. If the impressions had been made not long after the construction of the stacks, there would be little difference on a time scale of that magnitude. No, these were modifications. Which meant, although the content of the floor suggested it had only ever been used by the Cortes royal line, the impressions suggested the room had been used before. I had assumed the nature of the floor made it an addition, something not original to the layout of the library of the ancient Quinzen. An Empire boondoggle. I was forced to reconsider. If the Quinzen had made this place as well, and had deemed it necessary to hide, those very same Quinzen who believed in the ultimate power of knowledge for all, what were they trying to hide?

I resumed my post in the tower library room in much the same fashion as before. I sent for coffee and some breakfast, and got down to it. It was a small room, but there were plenty of works for me to go through and anything might be useful. I also needed to distract myself. Edouard was on a dangerous mission that would have been dangerous even if there was not an unknown timeline looming, when Carbo’s man would return to tell him that there were no such people as Prince Edouard and his valet Origio. At least not for nearly a thousand years. I ate some hot rolls fresh from the kitchen, tearing them open as Febril taught me to, enjoying the warm center and then moving on to the browned crust. A pat of butter in the center of the second roll and some preserves on top. I missed my mentor that morning. I had lived my life alone after my father died, taking care not to make close connections in case of severing and the requisite pain, but Feb had not let me go. He kept showing up. Once, when I was a teenager and angry about something I cannot even recall, I told him to stop.

“No,” he said.

“It wasn’t a question. I don’t want you to visit anymore. And I don’t want to come visit you either. Your wife hates me anyway.”

Such petulance.

“I don’t care. Hate me all you want. I will come back when you’re in a better mood.”

He got up from the table in the orphanage’s kitchen where we often sat together. I stood up fast and knocked my chair over. It clattered to the floor. Still, Febril was calm.

“I said I don’t want you to come back.”

“I heard you perfectly well Origio Litrati. But I don’t take my promises lightly. One day you’ll understand that if you can manage to pull your head out of its current position in your waste hole. Now walk me out.”

And I did. I walked him to the street and we embraced. I cried, feeling shame, and wet the shoulder of his cloak, but he did not say another word. He hugged me back and went on his way back to the Brick Palace of bread. He never again made reference to a promise, but I never forgot it.

I did not know I had fallen asleep until there was a pounding at the door. It woke me up with a start. I rubbed at my eyes with my knuckles. There was a book open on the table in front of me and the remains of my coffee and breakfast. The door was shaking on its hinges from the force of the banging. Before I had time to answer, it burst open and three huge men filed in one by one. A voice in the hall spoke to them. A voice I recognized.

“If he won’t come easy, do what you must.”

I stood and held my hands out in front of me.

“Gentlemen, I’m sure we have a misunderstanding on our hands here.”

I was sure of no such thing.

“I am the valet to the esteemed Prince Edouard, currently on an envoy mission for the King. I admit this is hardly the place for a nap but–”

“There is no misunderstanding, spy,” the closet grunt said.

He moved with a swiftness I would not have credited him with and brought his fist down on the top of my skull. I went down like a sack of bricks. I have no idea how much time passed before I opened my eyes again, but I did it with considerable effort. My head ached in a way I had never experienced before. It felt separate from my body, though I could feel every sluggish heartbeat resounding in my ears like a gong. It was dark and my eyes took some time to adjust, but I was shackled to a wall and there were bars a few feet ahead, so it was not a stretch to guess I was in a dungeon. It was silent but for the dripping of water somewhere nearby. I heard no other prisoners, no guards, or the soft mutters of the insane. I closed my eyes again and allowed myself to drift away with the pain.