Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(42)

Euterpe’s were among the hands that had held these books. She’d loved them since she was a small girl. She opened one, showing Silyen. The text was written in a crabbed, curling hand. It was as if the author had tried to cram as much as possible onto one page, because he feared there wouldn’t be enough paper in the world to hold every thought in his head.

Euterpe didn’t understand much of what the journals described, but she cherished their connection with her famous ancestor. Loved, too, the occasional verses that Cadmus composed in memory of his dead wife; or his scribbled observations on nature and the seasons. She delighted in the vivid pen-sketches of plants and animals.

Most of all, she treasured the passages overflowing with guilty, heartsick love for his Skilless young son, Sosigenes. The boy they never spoke of, who was a secret folded up and concealed like a love letter in the bosom of their family. It was Sosigenes’ plight that drove Cadmus’s relentless experimental, analytical exploration of his Skill and what it could do.

All through her childhood, Euterpe had sat in her window seat looking through the notebooks. She had empathized with her many-times-great-grandfather, and absolved him of both the acts laid at his door, and the hidden things he had done. She had turned every page.

Silyen’s hands were trembling, she noticed, as he finished his check of the journals and laid the last small volume down on the cloth-covered table.

‘Thank you,’ he said, turning to her. His voice was uncharacteristically hoarse. ‘Thank you so much. You don’t know how important this is.’

And so they resumed their routine, except instead of library books, Silyen studied the journals of Cadmus Parva-Jardine.

A few other things changed, too. When they walked round the moat, it would be Silyen pointing things out and sharing anecdotes from the notebooks. He recounted scraps of family history, noted alterations to the building and garden made by Cadmus, and repeated the man’s witticisms at the expense of members of other great families. Silyen’s recall was prodigious, and when she teased him about it, he confessed that he was memorizing large parts of the books by heart.

He was still getting taller, too, though he wasn’t thickening up into the muscular build of the Jardines. Euterpe thought of Whittam, her sister Thalia’s betrothed, and shuddered. They must be married by now, she supposed. But if they were, why had she not been at the wedding?

After a time, she noticed that Silyen had finished reading all the notebooks. One day he sat very quietly in the library, just looking at the journals spread out in front of him. Euterpe watched him nervously from the window seat. What else could she show him, to keep him coming to Orpen?

But she needn’t have worried. He merely began again, this time seeming to select the books at random. Or he’d set two or three alongside each other, flipping back and forth as if comparing, connecting.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked, after several visits had passed in this fashion. ‘You must have read them all ten times by now.’

Silyen looked up, startled. She hardly ever spoke when they were in the library.

‘I’m trying to decide what he got right and what he got wrong,’ he said.

Euterpe scoffed, not unkindly.

‘Cadmus knew more about Skill than anyone who’s ever lived.’

‘Is that so? He thought more about it, perhaps. But knew more? There’s one huge thing he didn’t know, that’s quite plain in this record.’

Euterpe stared at her friend. He clearly wanted her to ask, so with a sigh, she complied.

‘Why his son has no Skill,’ Silyen said.

She blinked in surprise. Those were the parts of the journals that she knew best – the bits that made her cry. What had Silyen seen that she had missed? That every other Parva heir who had read them had also failed to see.

‘Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think,’ Silyen said, ‘that the man with the strongest Skill in all our history should sire a child with none at all.’

His words hung between them. Euterpe could almost see them eddying and spinning in the resinous sunlight. Ideas trapped in amber, perfect and unchanging.

‘If it’s not coincidence,’ she said, ‘then what is it? Lots of Skill in one generation uses it up for the next?’

The boy would have tutted if he’d not been so well brought up.

‘All Cadmus’s other children were perfectly normal. No, it’s much simpler than that. Cadmus took it.’

‘Took it?’ Euterpe sprang to her feet, brimming with indignation on behalf of her slandered ancestor. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. He loved that boy more than anything. You’ve read his words: he was haunted his whole life by his son’s lack of Skill. Besides, how can you “take” Skill? I can’t believe the hours you’ve spent reading, and a stupid notion like that is the best you can manage.’

‘You seem a little defensive,’ Silyen said, in that bloodless way he sometimes had. At such times the inquisitive black-eyed teenager almost disappeared, leaving only the mechanical operation of an analytical brain. ‘I wonder why. Your sister, Thalia: her Skill is rather paltry, isn’t it? She can hardly boil tea in a cup. Which makes me wonder about you.’

Euterpe couldn’t bear it. She was not having this conversation. She just wasn’t. She threw her sketchbook down on the floor and ran out of the library. When, some hours later, Silyen walked past her deckchair on his way to the garden gate, she pressed her lips together and did not bid him goodbye.