and why? How had the hand got bitten off this carved wooden doll? What on earth use was a miniature funeral carriage? If it was a play-toy, it was certainly a ghoulish one. If those rusty stains on this shirt were blood—then was that slash a knife wound?
People came and went from the apartment buildings surrounding the vendors; tired and dirty and coming home from their work, or clean and ready for it. One thing living here did guarantee—that you had a job, a roof over your head, and enough money to feed you. If the roof was a single room and you crammed yourself, your spouse, and half a dozen children into it, well, that was your business and your problem. At least the building was going to be kept in good repair by your City taxes, your spouse and your children could find work to bring in enough to feed all the mouths in the family, and just perhaps one of your kids would turn out to be Gifted and become a Mage—and support the whole family.
Eventually he got to his goal, and feigning complete disinterest, began digging through the books. The bookseller himself looked genuinely disinterested in the possibility of a sale; from his expression, Kellen guessed that he was suffering either from a headache or a hangover, and would really rather have been in bed.
Luck was with him, or perhaps his new little mascot had brought it— Kellen found not only the Volume Four he was looking for—in a satis-fyingly battered and annotated condition—but Volumes Five, Six, and Seven, completing the set. They had stiff, pasteboard bindings of the cheapest sort, with the edges of the covers bent and going soft with use and abuse. They looked as if they'd been used for everything but study, which made them all the more valuable in Kellen's eyes, for the worse they looked, the less objection Anigrel could have to his marking them up further. And the more Lycaelon would wince when he saw his son with them.
I can hear him now — 'We're one of the First Families of the City, not some clan of rubbish-collectors'. If you must have your own copies to scribble in, for the One's sake, why couldn't you at least have bought a proper set in proper leather bindings!' And I'll just look at him and say, 'Are the words inside any different!' And of course he'll throw up his hands and look disgusted.
Baiting his father was one of Kellen's few pleasures, although it had to be done carefully. Pushed too far, Lycaelon could restrict him to the house and grounds, allowing him to leave only to go to his lessons. And an Arch-Mage found enforcing his will a trivial matter—and one unpleasant for his victim.
He was about to get the bookseller's attention, when a faint hint of gilding caught his eye. It was at the bottom of a pile he'd dismissed as holding nothing but old ledgers. There were three books there, in dark bindings, and yes, a bit of gilding. Rather out-of-keeping with the rest of these shabby wares.
Huh. I wonder what that is —
Whatever it was, the very slender volumes bound in some fine-grained, dark leather, with just a touch of gilt on the spine, seemed worth the effort of investigating. At the worst, they'd turn out to be some silly girl's private journals of decades past, and he might find some amusement in the gossip of a previous generation.
If he'd been in a regular bookseller's stall, Kellen might not have bothered. But…
It might be something interesting. And it's bound to be cheap.
If it wasn't a set of journals, the books might even do as a present for his father if the books were in halfway decent shape. An obsessive bibli-ophile, Lycaelon was always looking for things for his library. Literally anything would do so long as it wasn't a book he already had, and his Naming Day Anniversary would be in two moonturns.
It would be a bit better than the usual pair of gloves I've gotten him for the past three years.
It took Kellen some work to get down to the three volumes on the bottom of the pile, but when he did, he found himself turning them over in his hands with some puzzlement. There was nothing on the spine of each but a single image—a sun, a crescent moon, and a star. Nothing on the cover, not even a bit of tooling, and the covers themselves were in pristine condition—
Odd. Definitely out of keeping with the rest of the wares here.
He opened the front covers to the title pages.
Handwritten, not printed, title pages…
The Book of Sun. That was the first, and the other two were The Book of Moon and The Book of Stars. Journals after all? He leafed through the pages, trying to puzzle out the tiny writing. The contents were handwritten as well, and so far from being journal entries, seemingly dealt with magick.
They shouldn't be here at all! Kellen thought with a sudden surge of glee. They looked like workbooks of some sort, but books on magick were very closely kept, with Students returning their workbooks to their tutors as they outgrew them, and no book on magick that wasn't a part of a Mage's personal library was supposed to leave the grounds of the Mage College at all.
Perhaps some Student had made his own copies for his own use, and they'd gotten lost, to end up here?
But they weren't any of the recognized Student books, or anything like them, as far as Kellen could tell. The handwriting was neat but so small that the letters danced in front of his eyes, and the way that the letters were formed was unfamiliar to him, slightly slanted with curved finials. But it seemed to him that he recognized those three titles from somewhere.
