The Wise Man's Fear

exhausting.

On the third day of our search I nodded off while studying my metallurgy. I only dozed for half a minute before my head lolled, startling me awake. But the icy fear followed me for the rest of the day. If Ambrose had attacked at that moment, I could have been killed.

So, even though I couldn’t afford it, I began dipping into my thinning purse to buy coffee. Many of the inns and cafes near the University catered to noble tastes, so it was readily available, but coffee is never cheap. Nahlrout would have been less expensive, but it had harsher side effects that I didn’t want to risk.

In between bouts of research, we set about confirming my suspicions that Ambrose was responsible for the attacks. In this, if nothing else, we were lucky. Wil watched Ambrose return to his room after his rhetoric lecture, and at the same time I was forced to stave off binder’s chills. Fela watched him finish a late lunch and return to his rooms, and a quarter hour later I felt a sweaty prickle of heat along my back and arms.

Later that evening I watched him head back to his rooms in the Golden Pony after his shift in the Archives. Not long after, I felt the faint pressure in both my shoulders that let me know he was trying to stab me. After the shoulders, there followed several other prods in a more personal area.

Wil and Sim agreed that it couldn’t be coincidence: it was Ambrose. Best of all, it let us know that whatever Ambrose was using against me, he kept it in his rooms.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Kindling

The attacks weren’t particularly frequent, but they came with no warning.

On the fifth day after we started searching for the schema, when Ambrose must have been feeling particularly cussed or bored, there were eight of them: one as I was waking up in Wilem’s room, two during lunch, two while I was studying physiognomy in the Medica, then three in quick succession while I was coldsmithing iron in the Fishery.

The next day there were no attacks at all. In some ways that was worse. Nothing but hours of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So I learned to maintain an iron-hard Alar as I ate and bathed, as I attended class and had conversations with my teachers and friends. I even maintained it while dueling in Adept Sympathy. On the seventh day of our search, this distraction and my general exhaustion led to my first defeat at the hands of two of my classmates, ending my perfect string of undefeated duels.

I could say that I was too weary to care, but that wouldn’t be entirely true.

On the ninth day of our search Wilem, Simmon, and I were combing through books in our reading hole when the door opened and Fela slipped inside. She was carrying a single book instead of her usual armload. She was breathing heavily.

“I’ve got it,” she said, her eyes bright. Her voice so excited it was almost fierce. “I found a copy.” She thrust the book out at us so we could read the gold leaf on the thick leather spine: Facci-Moen ve Scrivani.

We had learned about the Scrivani early in our search. It was an extensive collection of schemata by a long-dead Artificer named Surthur. Twelve thick volumes of detailed diagrams and descriptions. When we found the index, we had thought our search was nearly finished, as it listed “Diagrames Detaling the Construction of a Marvelous Five-Gramme, proven most Effectatious in the Preventing of Maleficent Sympathe.” Location: volume nine, page eighty-two.

We tracked down eight versions of the Scrivani in the Archives, but we never found the whole set. Volumes seven, nine, and eleven were always missing, no doubt tucked away in Kilvin’s private library.

We’d spent two entire days searching before finally giving up on the Scrivani. But now Fela had found it, not just a piece to the puzzle, but the whole thing.

“Is it the right one?” Simmon asked, his voice a mixture of excitement and disbelief.

Fela slowly removed her hand from the lower binding, revealing in bright gold: 9.

I scrambled up out of my chair, almost knocking it over in my rush to get to her. But she smiled and held the book high over her head. “First you have to promise me dinner,” she said.

I laughed and reached for the book. “Once this is over, I’ll take everyone to dinner.”

She sighed. “And you have to tell me I’m the best scriv ever.”

“You’re the best scriv ever,” I said. “You’re twice as good as Wil could ever be, even if he had a dozen hands and a hundred extra eyes.”

“Ick.” She handed me the book. “Here you go.”

I hurried to the table and cracked the book open.

“The pages will be missing, or something like that,” Simmon said in a low voice to Wil. “It can’t be this easy after all this time. I know something’s going to spike our wheel.”

I stopped turning pages and rubbed my eyes. I squinted at the writing.

“I knew it,” Sim said, he leaned his chair back on two legs, covering his tired eyes with his hands. “Let me guess, it’s got the grey rot. Or bookworm, or both.”

Fela stepped close and looked over my shoulder. “Oh no!” she said mournfully. “I didn’t even look. I was so excited.” She looked up at us. “Do any of you read Eld Vintic?”

“I read the chittering gibberish you people call Aturan,” Wilem said sourly. “I consider myself sufficiently multilingual.”

“Only a smattering,” I said. “A few dozen words.”

“I can,” Sim said.

“Really?” I felt hope rising in my chest again. “When did you pick that up?”

Sim scooted his chair across the floor until he could look at the book. “My first term as an E’lir I heard some Eld Vintic poetry. I studied it for three terms with the Chancellor.”

“I’ve never cared for poetry,” I said.

“Your loss,” Sim said absently as he turned a few pages. “Eld Vintic poetry is thunderous. It pounds at you.”

“What’s the meter like?” I asked, curious despite myself.

“I don’t know anything about meter,” Simmon said distractedly as he ran a finger down the page in front of him. “It’s like this:

Sought we the Scrivani word-work of Surthur
Long-lost in ledger all hope forgotten.
Yet fast-found for friendship fair the book-bringer
Hot comes the huntress Fela, flushed with finding
Breathless her breast her high blood rising
To ripen the red-cheek rouge-bloom of beauty.

“That sort of thing,” Simmon said absently, his eyes still scanning the pages in front of him.

I saw Fela turn her head to look at Simmon, almost as if she were surprised to see him sitting there.

No, it was almost as if up until that point, he’d just been occupying space around her, like a piece of furniture. But this time when she looked at him, she took all of him in. His sandy hair, the line of his jaw, the span of his shoulders beneath his shirt. This time when she looked, she actually saw him.

Let me say this. It was worth the whole awful, irritating time spent searching the Archives just to watch that moment happen. It was worth blood and the fear of death to see her fall in love with him. Just a little. Just the first