Hours dragged by. I flipped through books and books and more books, but progress was slow. At one point, Vick wandered in to survey the library. His attention moved from me to Kyven, a sneer twisting his lips.
I frowned. What wasthatabout? Every time I saw him, he seemed increasingly resentful, and now I wished he would just get on with his plans to rob us elsewhere.
Or whatever the hell he was doing.
By mid-afternoon, my back ached. The books had no apparent order—fiction was jumbled with treatises on inter-territory commerce and textbooks on astronomy. I even found a volume about something called paleography, which turned out to be the study of ancient handwriting.
I tossed that one aside, frustrated. How did Olivian get anything done in here?
Then again, he mostly didn’t. He spent his time holed up in his study, arguing with the Lady Marche’s ghost.
With an aggrieved sigh, I thought better of my desecration of literature and bent to retrieve the paleography book. It had tumbled beneath an armchair, and when I reached for it, I spotted a bundle of withered weeds beside the splayed pages.
Wait. Not weeds.
My breathing picked up. No, those were the peonies Kyven had given me on our wedding night. I’d ditched them beneath the chair, then forgotten them completely.
I snuck a furtive glance, but he stood atop the sliding ladder by the window, thumbing through a massive tome. Meanwhile, Lunk and Amryssa huddled around a boardgame they’d unearthed.
Nobody was paying me any attention, so I snatched the flowers. The stems had shriveled, but the blossoms retained some volume, their champagne petals preserved in a perpetual state of bloom.
My mouth edged downward at the corners. How fitting that Kyven had chosen a flower that barely lasted. What was it he’d called me the other night?
My eight-week wife.
Eight weeks. Just a blip. Ephemeral and meaningless. Like these peonies.
“I think I’ve found something.”
I whirled, one hand flying to my chest when I found the subject of my ruminations standing right behind me. I shoved the flowers under my skirts, then winced at the snap of breaking petals. “What is it?”
He gave me a puzzled look. Shit. I’d spoken much too loudly for the rain-drenched gloom of the library. I composed my face, trying not to look too deranged.
“It’s only a sentence.” Kyven hefted the weighty tome. “And I’m lucky to have seen it at all. I only happened upon the right page. Otherwise, this book holds nothing but the lethally boring ramblings of some old steward who apparently considered the daily state of the larder to be worthy of immortalizing in ink.”
I blinked, digesting that. The peonies crackled again, and I forced a concealing cough. “Okay. Tell me what it says.”
“It’s dated from thirty years ago.” He read aloud in an immaculate Oceansgate accent. “Aside from waging war on the larder’s rats, I worry for the Lady Marche. She copes with her childlessness by writing feverishly in that little brown diary of hers, as if enough scribbled pleas to Zephyrine might buy her a babe.”
Childlessness. My mind swiveled and swooped around the word. I hadn’t realized Amryssa’s mother had had difficulties with her conception. Then I raked over the rest, and a spark simmered in my chest. “A ‘little brown diary?’”
“Exactly. Something like that would have to be around here somewhere, wouldn’t it?”
It would, and that was exactly the sort of thing that might provide clues to the dagger’s origins. But when I scanned the room, the internal spark flickered and died. These shelves housed thousands of books, half of which were brown, and while Kyven’s find might have narrowed our search, we’d still need weeks to sort through them all.
I glanced up to find him contemplating me, his head tilted.
“What?” I said.
“I’m just wondering if there’s any particular reason you’re crouched there on the floor.”
A flush warmed my neck. If I stood, he would see the peonies, and that was the last thing I needed. If he thought he’d caught me mooning over some meaningless trinket he’d given me,this cocksure prince would grow even cockier. Or...cocksurer? Cock?—
Never mind. Probably best to move on from that word entirely.
“Nope,” I said. “No reason. I’m just...admiring this chair. It’s very nice, don’t you think?”
He snapped the tome shut. “I didn’t know you were such a connoisseur of furniture.”
