Raven's Strike (Raven #2)(89)

"I thought we'd find a nice fat deer," Lehr said. "Since we'll be here a while, we can take time to preserve the meat."

Farther from Colossae the trees began to grow closer together, forming a sparse forest.

"I have a question," Ielian said.

"What is that?"

"Your mother talks about six Orders - and I was taught there are only five."

Lehr laughed. "I'd forgotten that. There are Falcon, Raven, Owl, Cormorant, Lark, and Eagle. The one you wouldn't have heard of is Eagle. Mother says that Travelers don't talk about them much, not even among themselves. Never to outsiders." His face grew somber. "The Eagle - the Guardian - is different, more difficult to bear."

"Your mother calls Jes, Guardian, sometimes."

Lehr nodded. "Jes is Eagle."

"He's..." Ielian tried to come up with a polite way to say it and failed.

"Slow?" Lehr offered. "He can seem that way sometimes. Mother says that he's not always paying attention, that he's always carrying on a running conversation with the Guardian half of himself. The Colossae wizards created the Orders, and I guess they didn't do the Eagle Order correctly. The Eagle is supposed to protect his clan - Jes can be pretty awesome in a fight."

"I saw him the night the Path fell," said Ielian.

"Then you know - ah, here's what I've been looking for. There's been a deer past here recently. Time to start the hunt."

"Let's explore the rest of the building before we start on this room," Seraph told Hennea, surveying the main room of the library. At least she hoped it was the main room. It would take them a long time to look through, and she didn't want to find any bigger rooms. "Wizards are a secretive lot. If they were working on something new, it might be in some obscure corner of the library, either high up or down in the basement."

Hennea pursed her lips. "If we're looking for something about the Orders, it won't be in bound books anyway. Otherwise, we'd have found something in the mermori libraries. It will be in parchments or handsewn notebooks of some sort. Maybe in a laboratory or work area."

"I'm glad I'm not a solsenti wizard," Seraph said. "I don't have the temperament to draw endless runes and mix potions in a laboratory. So, do we stay together or split up?"

"It'll take half the time to look if we split up," Hennea said, then she smiled. "Of course, if you are worried about being alone..."

Seraph snorted.

Hours later, Seraph was feeling as frustrated as any solsenti wizard.

She'd been right about the kinds of places wizards liked, and the section of the library that she'd found abounded in such places, small alcoves that were obviously private studies, laboratories with shelves full of jars and baskets of spell components, and slightly larger rooms where two or three wizards might have worked together. She'd walked leagues of mazelike halls that twisted and turned, with unexpected stairways and half stairways.

Everything as perfectly preserved as it must have been the day that they had left. She could not conceive of the power that had taken.

"You were here weren't you, Isolde?" Seraph murmured to herself as she walked through yet another narrow twisting hallway. "I wonder what you saw and where you were going? Did you know what they were doing, those great wizards who created the Stalker? Were you one of them, or did you protest futilely?"

She trailed a hand on the wall until she came to another door. The room was mostly empty, though it still smelled of some sort of incense or tobacco.

"I wonder where the Stalker is," she mused. "And why neither my Falcon nor my Eagle feels it anywhere." It hadn't struck her as odd until just that minute. Her sons could feel shadowing and, less reliably, the Shadowed, but they hadn't said anything about the Stalker at all.

There was a small desk and a chair on one end of the room. Someone had carved two letters in the wood of the desk. Remembering the scolding she'd given Jes and Lehr for carving their initials into the floorboards at home when they were about Rinnie's age, she smiled.

Some young person had sat here, she thought, brushing her hands over the chair, but keeping a lock on her talent for reading objects because she didn't know how the wizard's preservation spells would affect it. That didn't stop her from speculating. A student had been sent here to work, perhaps, and had taken his eating knife and carved his initials here instead, finding a kind of immortality in the act. Look, he said, I was here, I left my mark.

She stepped out of the room and shut the door gently.

"Excuse me, can I help you?" said a male voice in softly accented Common.

Seraph spun on her heel and stared at the young man who stood in the hallway behind her.

Except for his clothes, he looked every inch a Traveler. Silvery blond hair, not two shades off her own, hung to his shoulders, where it wasn't caught up in beaded braids. His eyes were a pale, pale grey, and he looked only a little older than Rinnie. He was naked except for a wraparound kilt of bright colors secured with a plain brown belt. Even his feet were bare.

"Who are you?" she asked, centering herself in case she needed her magic.

His small polite smile widened a bit, and he ducked his head without dropping her gaze. "You may call me Scholar. May I help you find what you need?"