With great difficulty he bent to one knee so his eye was level with the table, but he held his position only for a moment. Gripping the edge of the table and gritting his teeth, he quickly levered himself up again. His shattered left kneecap had long since healed, or at least the bones had grown together again, though they had never knitted well. Sometimes, Jai felt the bones grinding against each other, the pain like lightning shooting through him. It had been his bad luck to break his kneecap in the dark years after the gods had left and taken magic with them. There had been no one to heal him, mage or cleric or sorcerer.
“Be careful, Jai,” Annalisse murmured.
He said, “Yes, madam,” but didn’t look around. The librarian cared only about her books, scrolls, and manuscripts. Fond though she might be of him, her best apprentice, her true love was for the Library of Quali-nost. This Jai knew, and he didn’t resent it.
“Ah, excellent,” she said, as he slipped one page from atop another. “These pages are among our most precious treasures.”
Jai waited, hiding a smile, for he knew what she’d say next. He’d heard those words a hundred times.
“We can’t forget who we were, Jai. It’s how we know who we are, and how we can guess who we will be.”
He said, “Yes, madam,” as he had a hundred times. Hearing her dictum over and again did not lessen his belief in the truth of it.
Head bent, Jai returned to his work, for another thing the librarian liked to say was this: “Results. I care about results, and the only result that matters to me, or should ever matter to you, is that we preserve our Library in the best order.”
They did that, the Lady and all her scribes and cat-alogers and recorders and preservationists. Their devotion was to the Library of Qualinost, heart and soul, and each had sworn the quiet vow required upon entering the service of the Lady Librarian: There will always be a Library; there will always be History’s Hoard in Qualinost.
There would always be, Jai thought, his fingers teasing the edges of the parchments, looking for a way between. Yet the collection was not growing. Few new books came to the library these days. Annalisse and her staff tended what books they had in their collection. They repaired old manuscripts, brightened faded illuminations, deepened the ink of an ancient script, tried to maintain the various rooms at the proper temperature and level of humidity to keep safe manuscripts that were penned as long ago as the Age of Dreams. In the days before the Dragon Purge that had been easier to do. Then there had been elven mages to weave spells to keep the climate of the great Library of Qualinost at perfect balance.
No matter the difficulty, this was the dearest work of Jai’s heart, this careful preservation of a race’s history in the face of war and a dragon’s oppression. Most especially because of those things. Some elves stood against the dragon’s overlord-some with their bodies armed in secret or, as Jai’s own parents, standing as small links in a slender chain of shadowy resistance. Jai served in his own way, safeguarding the records of ancient elven heritage, the history to stand forever as a light against the darkness. In these days after gods, in these dragon days when House Cleric did not send its sons and daughters to temples but to libraries, Jai did holy work.
Beneath his hand now lay the Histories of Kings, the tales of all the rulers of the Qualinesti elves since fabled Kith Kanan himself had separated their race and led the people out of Silvanesti and into the forest. The thin page felt like silk. So did the breeze slipping in through the high window. Out that window the towers of Qualinost rose golden-lovely structures round which a great span of bridgework ran. Upon the bridge used to walk proud elven warriors who kept the kingdom and its gleaming capital safe.
But those were older times. Jai had been but an infant in his mother’s arms, and the king had been Solostaran. In these days of the dragon Beryl, all the Qualinesti had for leadership was Gilthas, the misbred son of the old king’s daughter, Princess Laurana, and her half-elven husband, but he was little more than a puppet on the Dark Knights’ strings. A marshal ran the kingdom now, a human named Medan, and no one doubted it was he who pulled the strings that made the weakling king dance.
At the Marshal’s order, the Qualinesti warriors had been disbanded. The young king did not make any significant protest. Troubled with ill health, when he roused, it was to dance the nights away with pretty women and then lull himself to sleep with his own- by all accounts turgid-poetry. While Gilthas danced, Medan’s black-armored Knights patrolled the silvery span round the elven city and sat in their squat, ugly barracks drinking, gambling, and making certain no elf doubted the ruthlessness of the green dragon’s minions.
The conflicted dragon balanced between her hatred of elves and her love of the tribute Medan squeezed out of them.
Jai’s hand shook, and his breath caught ragged in his throat. Very carefully, he slipped one thin sheet of parchment from atop the other, like brushing a shadow from a shadow.
Behind him, Annalisse said, “Don’t work too late, Jai.”
“I won’t,” he said, but they both knew he’d been long at his work and would be longer still.
She laughed. “Well, at least take time for your supper, will you?”
He said he would try, and the librarian said nothing more to discourage him from returning to his work. Those sheets needed separating before more damage occurred, and Jai Windwild had the patience for the work.
In the purpling twilight, Jai lurched down the garden path and home to his supper. He owned no crutch or cane. He owned only a slanting gait. It was his, and if he did not run on sun-dappled forest paths anymore, he’d taught himself not to regret that too much. He went each day to better places, into the lands of legend and the proud realms of elven history. There, he would have been happy to spend all his days.
The first golden fireflies danced ahead of him into the darker shadows beneath the arbor at the front of his parents’ little house. The heady scent of wisteria filled the twilight. Thick bunches of the amethyst flowers brushed Jai’s shoulders as he passed. He caught the door latch, balancing a little against the jamb, and the door opened under his hand.
Face white as the lone pale moon, his father gestured him inside.
“Father, what-?”
Emeth Windwild shook his head and closed the door behind his son. “Come in,” he said. “We must talk.”
Jai saw his mother beyond his father’s shoulder. She sat still as stone in a cushioned nook near the window that overlooked the little stream beside the house. Marise Windwild loved no place in her home better than this. She did not look out though. Her eyes darted from her husband to Jai, then to Emeth again.
Someone has died, Jai thought. The house had that kind of stillness, the breath-held quiet when sorry news has come. He thought of his father’s uncle who lived down in Mianost, a man so old it had been a wonder for the last ten years that he’d wakened each morning. When he turned to his father again, words of sympathy on his lips, he saw Emeth’s hand trembling. That trembling quieted every word Jai would have spoken. He had never seen fear in his father. Not during the terrible Chaos War, when all the world seemed to run mad, nor afterward when the dragon came. Not even when his son had shattered his knee, nor when he watched Jai struggle to walk again as healers warned he would not win that battle.
“What’s happened?” he asked. Marise Windwild drew a breath, as though her son’s question freed her. She shuddered, and her eyes welled. “Your father… he has been…”
She choked, tears spilled down her cheeks as Emeth finished her sentence. “We have to go, Jai. We have to leave the city. A message to one of the agents of the resistance went astray.”
Jai’s heart slammed hard against his ribs. “Father…” he said, whispering as though agents of Marshal Medan crouched in the shadows. “Father, something that implicates you?”