Shadow Road: Book 1 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy

44. Starting to Feel Like Home

20th of Nema

The next few weeks passed quickly, in many respects.

I was able to keep very busy translating for the Doctor and the Director at the School, enough that I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Then I woke at dawn every day, dragged into consciousness by the Island guinea fowl that roosted in the overgrown vines outside my window.

On the 15th, my name came up on Ydara's chore rotation and I learned that it does not require an entire tin of scouring powder to scrub twenty pots and pans. That discovery went hand in hand with finding out just how many suds it took to swamp the scullery floor.

Yesterday, the 19th, I finally had enough spare time to slip over to the school library.

The library inspired surprisingly mixed feelings.

On the one hand, it was a library, four whole stories of shelves, all of them stuffed with books and arranged on balconies around an airy central reading area. Just the smell of the place was enough to make me grin like a schoolgirl – ink, paper, leather glue, and furniture polish, the scent of long hours spent learning.

On closer inspection, they weren't just any books, either. They were beautiful books that looked like they might have come from NaVarre's family estate: leather-bound special editions, the kind with gilded illustration plates and velvety-smooth pages. There wasn't a single wadding-page copy to be found in the lot, although all the usual Southstreet novella writers were represented on the first floor – even Vignor Ladesky and his ridiculous Rosephyra Daguerre, Queen of the Wilds periodicals.

I almost picked one up. Not for me. I imagined Arramy finding it on his desk... then I sighed, put Rosephyra and the Ogre King's Breakfast back on the shelf, and kept exploring. Arramy would just throw it in the nearest bin, and shout at Arriankaredes for allowing someone to get past him again.

On the other hand, though, I kept stumbling into books I had in my personal collection at home. Books I read while curled up in my favorite chair by the hearth in my father's study, absorbed in another world while my father sat mere feet away, smoking his pipe, his nose in a book of his own.

I was in the middle of Tosarte's The Berrion Chronicles when the fire took everything. I found it. Not the exact copy I had, obviously, but the same version from Dartmarre Publishing Consortium with the lime-green leather binding and a gold-leaf lion prowling up the spine.

My first reaction was delight. I reached for it, pulling it from the shelf. But as I opened the cover, the words blurred together, and that frigid emptiness inside me unfurled, settling in a burning ache in my chest. I ran my fingers down the smooth surface of a page, my throat tight. I closed my eyes, but the memory still hung in front of me – marking my place with a scrap of note paper from Father's desk; gathering my shawl around my shoulders; bending to kiss his cheek before I went up to bed.

I let out an odd, shuddering little sound, snapped the book shut and shoved it back into the gap it came from, my heart pounding.

I couldn't bring myself to go near the Adventure section again. Instead, I found the Informationals and picked out something dense, wordy, and tedious for my bedside table: a particularly brick-like tome by the title A Thorough History of Roghuari Society in the Latter Half of the 100th Century looked like it would fit that bill nicely. I signed it out and went back to the Director's office to help him translate Caraki identification cards.

By that point I had been at the school for nearly a week. I knew where all of my things were, I was starting to figure out how to get where I needed to go without an escort, many of the students knew who I was and greeted me eagerly in the hallways. I could feel it: the warmth of that place was wearing through the flimsy bit of resistance I was trying to maintain. I had begun to hope. I could build a new life, have a place to call home, maybe do something that would make my father and Aunt Sapphine proud.