Page 52 of House of Dusk
“No.” The answer was quick, sharp, certain. “It’s done. It won’t change anything to know who I was.”
A wild goat had broken into Sephre’s garden last fall. By the time she chased it out, it had torn its way through the beds, heedless, snapping up tender shoots and vulnerable buds. She’d wanted very much to wring the creature’s neck. And yet here she was, ripping and chewing her way through Dolon’s past.
“So...you don’t remember any of it?”
“Only the flames.” His gaze went distant. “Blue flames. I stepped out from them and Halimede was there. I was at the shrine. On the mountaintop. And I felt...free. Like I’d just set down a boulder.”
Sephre hunched, feeling crushed and sour. It had been a mistake to come here. All she was doing was tormenting herself and making poor Dolon uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry I can’t help you, sister,” he said. “I’m not sure anyone can. The Embrace is personal. Although I suppose...But no, they’re sealed for a reason.”
She jerked her chin up at his thoughtful tone. “What are sealed?”
Dolon looked as if he regretted opening this conversational door. “Anyone who comes to Stara Bron seeking the Embrace is required to leave an account in the archives. But it wouldn’t be right to read them. They’re memories of lives that are gone now.”
A tremor shook her, as if one of the Fates had just tapped her on the shoulder. “How old? How long have they been kept?”
“Oh, centuries. We lost most of the records from before the cataclysm, of course, but there are some from not long after, I believe. I don’t visit those shelves often,” he admitted.
“Then the people who left those accounts are long gone to the labyrinth,” she said. “Most likely their spirits have been reborn a half-dozen times since. Surely it would do no harm to read them. I...I need this, Dolon. Please. There’s nowhere else I can go for answers.”
It wasn’t a lie. And it was more truth than she’d meant to give him. She felt suddenly naked as a bare root pulled from the dark earth.
A brief struggle contorted Dolon’s round face before he nodded. “I suppose...I suppose it’s a reasonable request. Come, I’ll show you where to find them.”
• • •
Sephre had skimmed two dozen codexes in the past three hours, and each one felt like a violation. Some were tragedies of fate, but many more were the brutal, hideous acts of people. Swabbing her fingers over her weary eyes, she half expected them to come away bloody.
And yet she could not stop. She told herself it was because of Nilos, because she had to learn whether his taunts had any truth to them. But she knew it was more personal than that. She was looking for justification. Proof that she was no different than any of these long-dead folk who had been reborn in flame. She squinted at cramped lines of faded ink, puzzled out archaic spelling, drowned herself in ancient pain, trying to measure it against her own.
Except that you couldn’t set your sorrows neatly onto a scale. There was no metric. How could she compare her own shames to that of a woman who accidentally poisoned her five children, mistaking dropwort for parsley?
Sephre closed the tormented mother’s codex and sat for a time, filling her lungs with the dry, cool air, tinged with the bitter scent of the pressed sheets of oilpith meant to protect the codexes from mildew and vermin. She was beginning to think this was a hopeless quest, on all counts.
Oilpith could only do so much. Many of the oldest were barely readable. If the Maiden—Faithful or Faithless—had left her story here, it might already be lost in a lacework of mice nibbles and blooms of mold.
Standing, she collected her current batch of codexes and returned them to the shelves. It was late afternoon by then, the shadows stretching. Carefully, she cupped a handful of flame in her left palm, kneeling to scan the lower recesses for any volumes she might have missed.
The flame wavered. Strange. She felt no breeze. Sephre swept her hand slowly, following a draft that only the fire seemed to feel, until she knelt beside the farthest niche.
Reaching into the shadows, she felt dust, slippery under her fingers. Then something more solid: a small oblong. She pulled it out.
A codex, barely larger than her palm. She traced the knot of twine twisted around the leather cover. She’d worked out the meaning of the colors over the past hours. It had been a small relief to discover she could skip over those tied in white thread. Those belonged to children, and the two she’d skimmed before realizing the pattern had been devastating enough. Sephre doubted that the Faithless Maiden had been Embraced as a child. If there was some secret here, it belonged to the woman grown.
That left only the gray-knotted accounts of the criminals, and the handful of volumes bound in black. Testaments of adults who had sought the Embrace willingly. Like this one.
She tried to work the knot free, but the years had settled the cord like stone. Carefully, she pressed one fingertip to the binding. Not one of the traditional uses of the holy flame, but then, it was the flame that had guided her to this book. A hum filled her chest as she tugged loose the singed cord. Pages thin as onionskin fell open, and Sephre nearly dropped the codex to the floor.
The Serpent’s star sign stared up at her. Seven points, joined in a faceted ring, drawn carefully in black ink.
She searched the facing page for some explanation, but found the paper mottled with mold, barely legible. Only bits and pieces remained.
. . . knew what I had done when I took my vows, yet still calls me sister . . .
. . . the terrible cost of my betrayal . . .
. . . trusted one who loved me too well . . .
