Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(2)
The Welsh girl was calmly reading, though she closed the Blank and returned it to his shelf when he shut the door behind him.
“People will talk, Glain,” he said. He had no temper for this right now. He needed, burned, to tell her what he’d learned, but at the same time he was on the precarious edge of emotion, and he didn’t want her of all people to see him lose control. He wanted to rest and face her fresh. That way, he wouldn’t break into rage, or just . . . break.
“One thing you learn early growing up a girl—people always talk, whatever you do,” Glain said. “What bliss it must be to be male.” Her tone was sour, and it matched her expression. “Where have you been? I had half a mind to call a search party.”
“You damn well know better than to do that,” he said, and if she was going to stay, fine. He had no qualms about stripping off his uniform jacket and unbuttoning his shirt. They’d seen each other in all states as postulants struggling to survive Wolfe’s class, and the High Garda wasn’t a place that invited modesty, either.
He really must have been too tired to think, because his fingers were halfway down the buttons on his shirt when he realized she’d see the smuggling harness, which was a secret he didn’t feel prepared to share just yet. “A little privacy?” he said, and she raised her dark eyebrows but got up and turned her back. He didn’t take his eyes off her as he stripped off the shirt and reached for the buckles of the leather harness that held the book against his chest. “I need sleep, not conversation.”
“Too bad. You won’t get any of the former,” she told him. “We’re due for an exercise in half an hour. Which is why I was looking for you. The orders came after you’d gone sneaking into the night. Where exactly did you go, Jess?”
Jess. So they weren’t on military footing now, not that he’d really thought they were. He sighed, left the harness on, and replaced the old shirt with a fresh one. “You can turn,” he said, as he finished the buttons. She did, hands clasped behind her back, and stared at him with far too much perception.
“If that bit of false-modesty theater was meant to distract me from the fact you’re wearing some kind of smuggling equipment under that shirt, it failed,” she said. “Have you gone back into the family business?”
The Brightwells had a stranglehold on the London book trade, and had fingers in every black market across the world, one way or another; he had never told her that, but somehow, he also wasn’t surprised she knew. Glain liked to learn everything she could about those close to her. It was a smart strategy. He’d done the same with her, the only daughter of a moderately successful merchant who’d nearly bankrupted himself to earn her a place at the Library. She’d been raised with six brothers. None of them, despite sharing her strong build and height, had been inclined at all to military life. Glain was exactly what she seemed: a strong, capably violent young woman who cared about her abilities, not her looks.
“If you’re a Brightwell, you’re never really out of the family business,” he said, and sat down on his bed. The mattress yielded, and he wanted to stretch out and let it cradle him, but if he did, he knew he’d be asleep in seconds. “You didn’t just barge in here to make sure I was still alive, did you?”
“No.” She sounded amused and completely at ease again. “I needed to ask you a question.”
“Well? As you said, we’ve got only half an hour—”
“Somewhat less now,” she said. “Since we’re having this conversation. What do you know about the Black Archives?”
That stopped him cold. He’d expected her to ask something else, something more . . . military. But instead, it took his tired brain a moment to scramble to the new topic. He finally said, “That they’re a myth.”
“Really.” Scorn dripped from that word, and she leaned back against the wall behind her. “What if I told you that I heard from someone I trust that they’re not?”
“You must have slept through your childhood lessons.” He switched to a childish singsong. “‘The Great Library has an Archive, where all the books they save—’”
“‘Not fire or sword, not flood or war, will be the Archive’s grave,’” Glain finished. “I memorized the same childhood rhymes you did. But I’m talking about the other Archives. The forbidden ones.”
“The Black Archives are a story to frighten children—that’s all. Full of dangerous books, as if books could be dangerous.”
“Some might be,” she said. “And Dario doesn’t think it’s a myth.”
“Dario?” Jess said. “Since when do you believe anything Dario Santiago says? And why is he talking to you at all?”
She gave him a long unreadable smile. “Maybe he just wants to keep track of what you get up to,” she said. “But back to the subject. If it’s where they keep dangerous information, then I say that’s a place that we need to look for any hints about what happened to send Thomas to his death. And who to go after for it. Don’t you?”
Thomas. Hearing his best friend’s name said aloud conjured up his image behind Jess’s eyes: a cheerfully optimistic genius in the body of a German farm boy. He missed Thomas, who’d had all the warmth and understanding of others that Jess lacked. I can’t think about him. For a wild instant, he thought he’d either shout at her or cry, but somehow he managed to keep his voice even as he said, “If such a place as the Black Archives even exists, how would we go about getting into it? I hope Dario has an idea. I don’t.”