The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(69)

Father’s eyes narrowed. “Who says we didn’t?”

My heart jolted. Of course. We might have. But I didn’t let it show on my face. I held my ground, hoping he was bluffing, hoping I was calling his bluff.

Father thumbed absently at his robe at the spot where he usually kept his long chain of keys. His gaze went to the window, to the lights in the city below and the stars above. “I’m not sure. We had other things to do. Always other things.”

“We could still go.”

The look he shot me carried with it a tidal wave of pain and remorse. “Don’t you think I’ve thought of that?” he said, his voice soft. And then he shook his head and waved his hand. He cleared his throat. “Go. Read the books. Tell me when you’re done.”

I left the questioning room, more baffled than I’d been all those times I couldn’t answer his questions. The library key – the real one – lay heavy in my pocket. I could have hoped for a new key, a new room, but at least this way I could study day or night in the library without being spied upon.

But the library was not empty when I arrived, and spies were not always constructs.

Bayan sat on the rug, his back to the wall and a book in his hands. He looked up when I entered. The light from the lamps seemed to gild him, turning his taupe skin golden. He looked even more beautiful by lamplight, an ethereal being of light and shadows. “You got another key,” he said, his voice flat.

I brandished it, taking a little delight in the fact that I now officially had more keys than he did. “I did. And well earned, too.”

He only nodded back at me, his face solemn. And then he reached into his sash pocket and produced another key – this one with a golden bow. “So did I.” The solemn look on his face burst open, cleanly as a cracked egg, revealing the smile beneath. “Poor Lin, always playing catch-up.” The words didn’t bite the way they usually did. I couldn’t tell if it was his tone, or if it was because I had a few more keys Bayan knew nothing about.

I shrugged. “What are you reading?” I strode toward him and leaned over his shoulder to look.

He twisted away from me, cradling the book as though it were an infant and I’d just jeered at it. “It’s none of your business.”

“Does it matter? I’m allowed to read it now too.”

“You wouldn’t understand it,” he spat back at me.

Oh, a fair bit more defensive than he should have been. I made as if to turn around, and then as soon as he’d relaxed, whirled and bent my head to the side.

“‘Era of the Alanga’?” I read aloud. “Aren’t you supposed to be studying?”

He glared at me, sullen. “Aren’t you?”

Well, he had me there. I couldn’t look for the books I needed to reprogram Mauga, the Construct of Bureaucracy, not while Bayan was here. So I lingered. “Is it interesting?”

He seemed to weigh whether my words mocked him or not. When he couldn’t dig out even a grain of contempt or derision, he sighed. “Yes, it’s interesting. It’s about the time before the Sukai Empire was even a thought in someone’s mind. Before the Alanga began fighting one another.”

“What does the book say it was like?” I should have been needling him, trying to get him to leave, but I couldn’t help my curiosity. Father’s entire justification for the bone shard collecting, for the constructs, was to keep the Alanga from rising again.

“They could make the wind rise up when they called it, they lived for thousands of years and no one dared to challenge them. Each one ruled an island. It could be a dream or it could be a nightmare, depending on who you asked. If you didn’t agree with the way they ran things, it wasn’t like you could disagree. But things didn’t get really bad until they went to war against one another. Their capacity for destruction was immense.”

I thought of Deerhead Island, the way it had been wiped from the map. Father had put out a statement saying the sinking had been caused by a mining accident, which, if the servants’ gossip was anything to judge by, had been less than reassuring. “Did the Alanga sink islands?”

“It doesn’t say.”

“But the Sukais found a way to kill them.”

“Yes, well, we know all about that.” He snapped the book shut. “Unless you don’t remember lessons?”

I wasn’t a lackwit; I still knew my numbers. “It’s not like that. You know it’s not like that. You gave me this illness in the first place.”

He ran a hand over the binding of the book. “It could be that you had forgotten through ordinary means.”

“What, like old age?”

He looked at me, startled, and then we both burst out laughing again. I really should have hated him. I’d strongly disliked him for the past five years. And now it seemed that was fading. The sharp edges of him looked different, now that I understood why he disliked me. We diminished into giggles, and then into silence once more. “Does it say how the Sukais killed the Alanga? I know Rise of the Phoenix likes to pretend it was a special sword. Father said that isn’t true: it just plays well with commoners.”

“A special sword that gets handed from one Sukai to another so they can kill the Alanga? Why wouldn’t the Alanga just take the sword from them then? They certainly were powerful enough to.”