Chapter 64: The Pact of Enemies, Part Seven: Valah Is Sealed

She didn't say anything.

That was the hardest part of Wednesday: Lianza D'Tariel said absolutely nothing. She watched us come down the stairs, closed her book, said goodnight with that courtesy of hers that cuts deeper than an insult, and went to her room.

Ten steps behind her, because that's what I get paid for.

At the door, she stopped.

"Elcronne."

"Princess."

"Are you alright?"

You see, you have to understand what that does. I had spent the entire afternoon preparing explanations—that Layda was helping me with an assignment, that it was a coincidence, that the library belongs to everyone—I had three versions ordered from worst to best, and she asked me if I was alright.

"Yes."

"Good." She opened the door. "Get some sleep."

And she went inside.

It took two hours to fall asleep, and I woke up with my stomach tied in knots.

"She's going to think the worst," I told Garchi.

Garchi yawned.

"Right. You too."

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽ ☆ ☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

Professor Vauxol sent us to the archive that morning, and to this day I don't know if it was a coincidence.

"Source work," he said. "Each of you chooses a document predating the Treaty of Ashes and explains to me on Thursday why it lies. All documents lie, young ones. The ones that don't lie are the ones they burned."

He raised his hand before anyone could ask.

"Yes, you may go down to the archive. No, you cannot touch anything on the third floor. Yes, Mrs. Yalene will shush you. No, don't take it personally: she shushes the paintings."

Mayorka's archive is under the east wing. Three floors of cold stone, the smell of paper that has been deliberating for two hundred years, and an old woman who shushes you even before you make a noise, in advance, like someone preventing a disease.

The first floor is open for consultation: chronicles, genealogies, the same twenty books everyone quotes without ever having opened. The second is for records, and to go down you have to sign your name in a ledger.

The third floor has no ledger. The third floor has an iron door with three locks and a brass plaque that reads EMPERO COUNCIL, and it has been there since before anyone I know was born.

Layda and I split up as soon as we entered, because a scholarship commoner and the Dog at Her Heels looking for the same thing in the same aisle is the kind of image that sticks.

Going down to the second floor. On the second floor are the territorial records, ordered by district, and the catalog is a cabinet of eighty drawers that someone organized in a century when handwriting was different.

It took forty minutes to understand the system. Another twenty to find the drawer.

And then, with a finger, running down the index cards, letter by letter.

*Vaera. Valdrenne. Valgar.*

Half an hour for three centimeters of cardboard.

*Valah — Civil district, Jahke protectorate.*

*Report of the Empero Council's Investigators Unit.*

*Ref. 1147-C.*

And below, in different ink, with small, bureaucratic, and absolutely inhumane handwriting:

*WITHHELD. Council Seal. Consultation restricted to Rank S.*

Lingering with my finger resting on that line for a while.

And then I saw the other thing.

The ink on the rest of the card was brown, eaten away, with that paleness iron takes on when it has been drying in a basement for a century. Dates, names, references: all the same tired brown.

The ink on that last line was black.

How long it takes for ink to turn brown was unknown to me. What I knew was that it wasn't a matter of weeks. And I knew what it meant that on a card from a hundred and forty years ago there was a line written in ink that hadn't even begun to age.

Someone had closed that file recently.

Someone had closed it in time.

Heading up to Mrs. Yalene's desk, I asked for file 1147-C, which was an act of optimism I still laugh at.

The old woman looked at the card. Looked at the Council seal. Looked at me, up and down, pausing just long enough on the cuffs of my shirt.

"Rank S," she said.

"I'm not."

"I can see that."

"What if a professor requested it?"

"Not a professor either." She returned the card. "Rank S. There are five on the continent and none of them come down here."

About to insist, it must have showed so much that she raised her hand before I even opened my mouth.

"And no," she said. "Neither for your house, nor for your mistress, nor because it's urgent, nor because your grandfather was a very good person. I have been in this basement for forty-one years, young man. Kings have asked me for things."

"Kings?"

"One." She adjusted her shawl. "And I told him exactly the same thing."

Standing in front of her desk with nothing to do with my hands, she returned to her ledger and left me there just long enough to understand that the conversation was over.

Then, as I was leaving, without looking up:

"You're the second this month."

Turning around.

"The second what?"

"The second to ask me for that number." She turned a page. "I'm not going to tell you who. And I don't plan on telling the other person you were here either."

She shushed me, even though I hadn't made a sound.

⋅•⋅⊰∙∘☽ ☆ ☾∘∙⊱⋅•⋅

It's here. Forty steps away from me, on the third floor, behind a door that only five people on the continent can open. Two of them are the bride and groom's parents. Another is a blind old man who walks barefoot on water and has never gone down to a basement in his life.

And yet, you see, I don't know how to explain what I felt, because it was the exact opposite of despair.

I had lived three months with the advantage of knowing how the book ended, and for three months I had watched the book change pages under me. That morning, for the first time, I found something that wasn't in the novel. A reference number. A drawer. An old woman with a Council seal.

The Valah file doesn't appear a single time in *The Throne of Ashes and Thorns*. I read it ten times. It's not there.

Which meant one of two things: either it didn't matter, or someone had done an excellent job.

And there was a third option that I didn't dare think through completely until that night, lying on my cot with my eyes open: that the novel I read ten times was never the world. It was what suited someone to tell about the world.

A book is also an archive.

A book also has a third floor.

"Did you find it?" Layda appeared from the other end of the aisle with three heraldry tomes in her arms, for decoration.

"It's withheld. Council Seal. Rank S."

She didn't even blink.

"Perfect."

"Perfect?"

"A withheld document is a document that exists, Elcronne. I've spent a lot of time searching for things that didn't exist." She placed the tomes on the cart. "This is a key problem. Key problems get solved."

"It's an Empero Council seal."

"It's a lock with a pretty name."

"And what have you been searching for all morning?"

"Genealogies of vassal houses." She tapped the top tome twice. "Those of Analazze. The two bearers."

"And?"

"That the house existed and was called Ferrant. That Mayorka guards half of their records." She tucked her hair behind her ear. "And that the other half is on the third floor."

"Of course it is."

"Everything is on the third floor, Elcronne. I'm starting to think the entire academy is a hallway that leads to that door."

"Layda."

"Listen to me." She lowered her voice without lowering her head, a trick she does when she wants you to look at her. "Everything we've found this week we've found because someone put it in front of us. The word on Monday. The three requirements on Tuesday. A source work assignment this morning, exactly this morning, in the only place in Mayorka where that file is."

My mouth went dry.

"We're not that smart, Elcronne. Neither of us. We've spent three days walking down a hallway that someone swept before we arrived."

"So what do we do?"

"Keep walking." She pushed the cart. "But watch where you step."

"Who has the key?"

"Someone who already knows we want it."

Looking up. At the end of the aisle, leaning against the archive door with his arms crossed and hands stained with rainbow ink, Professor Vauxol Aliandys was watching us.

He had been there for I don't know how long.

Seeing that I had spotted him, he did something worse than calling us out, worse than reporting us, and worse than asking questions.

He put a finger to his lips, smiled, and left.

Layda let out air through her nose.

"Well," she said. "Now we know who sweeps the hallway."

"We don't know that."

"Elcronne, he just made a gesture of complicity at us. In an archive. In front of the drawer he himself sent us to open."

"That man put me in a shrinking cage," I said. "And in a fog forest with a teleportation seal that nearly tore me in half. And both times he smiled exactly the same way."

Layda thought about it.

"Ah."

"Yes."

"Then we have a problem."

"We have an ally or we have a trap," I said, "and both things look very much alike from here."