Discovery. Uncovering the unknown and the unknowable; that was what Ru lived for.
The breeze rose up, scattering debris up under Ru’s hat and into her face. She coughed and sneezed in quick succession, rubbing her nose. Her oil lamp, unlit and perched precariously on a nearby rock, fell with a clatter.
A wind was coming in from the south, and would only grow as the day marched on.
“Water?”
Ru started, turning toward the voice.
She hadn’t seen anyone approach, her hat’s brim blocking her peripherals. She lifted the edge of the brim and saw the dirt-smudged face of Archie Hill, her friend and fellow academic.
Archie had come to study at the Tower the same year Ru had when they were nineteen. Most academics at the Tower were in their late teens or twenties, pursuing education and specialized research that couldn’t be accomplished in the colleges of the capital city, Mirith.
And Archie, educated by a private tutor since childhood, had tired of the wealthy lifestyle and gone to the Tower for two reasons: First, the pursuit of higher education. And second, to get away from his family. Even so, from his speech to the way he carried himself, Archie’s entire being simply screamedaristocrat.
But beyond that, something about his jovial nature, his inability to take anything seriously, had drawn Ru to him. She was, in many ways, the exact opposite of Archie. Where he was easygoing, she was uptight. Where he was happy to let things happen as they may, she was unable to operate without a plan. They worked in concert, then, balancing one another. Although they were constantly disagreeing about things.
The two had met in one of the Tower’s libraries, both searching for books on ancient knives. Ru had been looking for sources to help her determine whether a knife she had found at Dig Site 15 was made for slicing bread or meat. Archie, meanwhile, had been hoping to determine what kind of knife would have been used by coastal merchants to skin fish in the 600s.
Archie and Ru had knocked hands when they reached for the same book at the same moment. Bursting into laughter, they had been friends ever since.
In their second year at the Tower, they brought a third into the group: Gwyneth Tenoria. She was a young woman from a noble family in Mirith, and like most of the noble families, she was very distantly related to the Regent of Navenie. But unlike most nobles, who oozed upper class with every breath, Gwyneth did a far better job of hiding her upbringing. She was far more interested in discussing her various hypotheses surrounding the domestication of livestock in the western coastal city of Solmaria.
Ru almost wished Gwyneth could be here, looking at vases with her in the sunlight. But Gwyneth had her own research to work on, and experiments to conduct in the labs of the Tower.
Archie grinned brilliantly. His own wide-brimmed hat was pushed back to hang behind him from his neck, his lightly curling hair blowing across his forehead. He had the pale green eyes of his family, and while his jaw could have cut glass, his lips were conversely full and soft. A dash of freckles fell across his nose.
He was handsome, and Ru had conducted her own experiments on those lips in the past. But they were short-lived, mainly for fun, and ultimately fizzled out. The only experiments between the two now were purely academic.
“You look absolutely parched,” he said, waggling his water canteen, its leather marred from years of careless use.
Ru grabbed the canteen from his long fingers and took a deep, almost desperate swig. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was, how much time had passed while she’d been delicately brushing at dirt-caked ceramics with a tiny brush.
When she’d drunk her fill, she returned the canteen, wiping her lips with a dusty sleeve.
“You’ve guzzled all my water,” said Archie, performing anger.
Ru only laughed. “Should have thought of that before you offered.”
Archie wouldn’t mind. In fact, Ru suspected he never truly minded anything she did. On the contrary, she knew he liked her. More than liked her. They had long since ceased falling into bed together, but she saw him; the way his eyes lit up for her, the way his smiles curved when she was near.
But he never made any attempt to rekindle the dalliance, which was a relief to Ru. He was one of her closest friends; she hated the idea of that changing. And anyway, he would move on soon enough. There were plenty of other girls at the Tower, most of them far prettier than Ru.
Ru knew that her looks were outstandingly average. Her brown hair was long and unruly, curling in the rain and going brittle in dry heat. She wasn’t tall and elegant, nor was she petite and delicate like Gwyneth, who had no shortage of suitors. Her eyes were brown like her hair, her skin sun-tanned, and she rarely wore makeup. Her nose was slightly longer than she would have liked, her ears slightly larger. And her mouth, though her lips were full enough, seemed always to be curved downward in a slight frown.
None of it made much of a difference to Ru, though. Love and romance were very low on her list of priorities. She was wholly devoted to the life of academia for the time being, and that was how she liked it. She felt that she would never get bored of studying the lives of past civilizations, of the different ways in which people lived, lifetimes and lifetimes ago.
Even the thought of it, the secrets and stories she had yet to uncover, lit joy in her heart. Though the joy was never as bright now as it had been once — when she had allowed herself to study the subject that truly spoke to her soul.
“Hey,” said Archie, indicating Ru’s newly unearthed vase. Its mouth was wide enough for a hand to fit through, its belly even wider. He knelt to touch the thing gingerly, fingers brushing away a patch of dust. “What is this, your fourth this dig?”
“Fifth.”
Hot wind ruffled Archie’s hair, almost the same light tan color as the vessel in Ru’s hands. “You think it’s a potter’s house?”
Ru shrugged. “Or a fancy cellar, maybe. Last year we found a house where someone had been storing food in what we thought were ceremonial urns.”
Archie studied the vase, reaching out to run his finger along its rim. “I wish we could see them, you know. Just have a little glimpse. Go back in time and peek through the window.”
