“You mean he killed them?”
Susan nodded, barely pausing. It had happened a long time ago, after all. And still, they had seen the Genius — this one, anyway — and the story didn’t feel easy, or far away.
Susan read: “‘Then came the just wrath of the universe, when the beast within became the beast without, and the life of man was cursed on the face of the earth.’”
The beast without, Nell thought, shuddering. She moved up to the head of the bed, beside Jean and her doll, and lay back to stare at the ceiling.
“But what about this place?” she asked. “How did this place survive?”
She heard the sound of pages turning.
“That’s another story,” Susan said. “There’s plenty here. I think I could spend all night reading this thing.”
She very nearly did. Long past midnight, she roused Nell.
“I finished it,” Susan said. “And it’s all here. In stories, in legends, but here.”
Nell sat up in bed. The room was dark but for one lamp, flickering near Susan’s bed. Jean and Kate slept curled together in the bed by the window, fully clothed.
“You mean how to open the window? That’s in there?” Nell’s heart began to hammer in her chest.
“No,” Susan said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. I just meant that the history of this place — what made the people the way they are — it’s in here.”
“Oh.”
Nell felt deflated, half drunk with sleep and the feeling that she had woken from a bad dream. But Susan was still wide awake, more alert than she’d been since they’d come down the mountain. So Nell asked, half-heartedly, what she’d learned.
“It’s a great story, really,” her sister said. “Even in the one book, not all the stories agree with each other exactly. Legends are like that. But in one of them, it said that when the change came, the Genius really went nuts. He thought the surviving scholars had done it to him — some sort of revenge. So he hunted them down. He wanted to kill every one.”
“And did he?”
“No. A few of them understood the danger and took a group of scholars and their families into hiding in the mountains across the sea. They took with them all the books they could gather and set out — the last of the thinkers.”
“The library? That’s a lot of books!”
Susan smiled. “There were more, if you can believe it. These were only what they could save. Plenty burned in the wars; I can only dream of what they were like.”
She’d almost lost the thread of the story as she speculated, but now she took it up again, describing the years the scholars spent in the empty spaces they could find in the far-off lands, Elsare and Ferent and Sayca. Most of them had been lost among the people there, but a few came back when the first Genius was long dead, when his son and then his grandsons and great-grandsons had taken his place. Those scholars — Susan guessed they were the ancestors of the ones today — built the sanctuary in secret and hid it in the mist.
Nell thought about this. “If they can do things like make the mist, why haven’t they used it to destroy the Genius or take the city? What’s stopping them?”
But Susan had no answer, and at talk of the mist she’d retreated into herself again, if only a little. She set the book down and rubbed her eyes.
“I’m tired now,” she said. “And I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find out more. We’ll tell Max, too.”
She reached up and snuffed the lamp, leaving the room in darkness. Nell blinked and turned her head to the window, now the only source of light. She heard Susan lie down, sighing. Outside, stars crowded the sky, dust and glitter and splintered radiance, as the faint glow of the half moon, nearly out of sight over the sanctuary, spread a milky sheen across the dark.
The corn harvest took the first hours of the next day, and Nell found herself walking beside Minna and a frail-looking girl named Chim beneath the tasseled heads of the corn, peering into them to check if the silk that flowed from them had browned. She pulled a fat cob from the stalk and tossed it into the wide burlap sack the others carried between them. She had the urge to lag, but Minna and Chim kept her moving. The morning mistress, a stout, dark-skinned young woman called Leese, was up ahead, lecturing as she pulled corn on the wonders of crop rotation. Mistress Leese spoke in slow, perfectly articulated sentences, as if she were always reading aloud at the front of the class. Nell tried to imagine her in a hurry, anywhere, for anything, and failed.
The morning cool lingered in the fields, and the sweetness of the corn was in the air. All around Nell, the green stalks waved and whispered, and she thought that she could love this kind of school, despite the Shepherdess’s persistent cheer, despite Mistress Leese, now expounding on the mysteries of winter rye and oats and the beneficial qualities of hairy vetch. She could love it for the cool of the morning air and the smell of corn and the blue eggshell sky overhead, and the sounds of the little girls singing.
But corn and sky and hairy vetch were nothing to do with windows. She wondered what Max was learning.
Later, when the girls had washed and turned the corn over for shucking to Susan’s group, who waited to separate the cobs from the silk before passing it to the herbalist who would take the silk for his medicines, Nell met Susan in the hall.
“The older class, what do they learn?” she asked her.
Susan frowned in that way she had now, as if she were hard of hearing and trying to make words out.
“I don’t know. Proper shucking techniques, this morning. And the uses of corn silk.”
“Yes, but what else?”
Susan shrugged.
