The Beauty of Darkness - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,155
was difficult. They all left with little notice for remote Sacristas in Morrighan. So they said. I went to see Argyris a month after he left, but the Sacrista said he’d stayed only a few days and then moved on. They didn’t know where he had gone.”
If he was angry when I told him about the scholars, he was incensed when I questioned him about the bounty hunter sent to slit my throat. He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head, mumbling stupidity under his breath.
“I was careless,” he finally said. “When I found the books missing and your note in their place, I went about looking for them.” A single brow rose and he shot me a pointed stare. “You did say you reshelved them in their proper place. I thought they would be in the archives.” He said the Chancellor found him and his assistants tearing the shelves apart and asked what they were searching for. An assistant jumped in with an answer before the Royal Scholar could say anything. “The Chancellor was furious and searched through a few shelves himself before he stormed out of the room yelling for me to burn the book if I found it as I’d been ordered to do in the first place. After five years, I found it odd that he even remembered the text, since he had declared it barbarian jibberish. “I began wondering about him at that point. I even searched his office, but turned up nothing.”
That didn’t surprise me. My results had been the same. The Royal Scholar leaned forward, the anger draining from his face. “I was required by law to sign the single warrant for your arrest and offer a bounty for your return. It was posted in the village square, but that warrant didn’t include murder. I never sent a bounty hunter to kill you, nor did your father. He only sent trackers to find and retrieve you.”
I stood, walking around the room. I didn’t want to believe him. I spun to face him again. “Why did you ever hide the Song of Venda away in the first place? My mother told you to destroy it too.”
“I’m a scholar, Jezelia. I don’t destroy books, no matter what they contain. Such old texts are a rarity, and this appeared to be one of the oldest I had ever come across. I’d only recently placed the Testaments of Gaudrel in the drawer beside the Vendan text in what I thought was a secure hiding place. I was eager to translate it.”
I saw the energy in his eyes when he spoke of the old texts.
“I translated most of the Gaudrel text,” I said.
His attention was riveted, and I told him about the history it contained, cautiously gauging his reaction.
“So Gaudrel and Venda were sisters,” he repeated as if trying to eat a tough piece of meat, chewing on words that he couldn’t quite swallow. “And Morrighan the grandchild of Gaudrel? All one family.” He rubbed his throat as if trying to coax the words down. “And Jafir de Aldrid a scavenger.”
“You don’t believe me?”
His forehead furrowed. “Unfortunately, I think I do.”
He went to the bureau I had taken the text from, and I watched with surprise as he opened a drawer with a false bottom.
You have secrets. I had known it that day, but once I had found one secret, I hadn’t searched for more.
“Just how many secrets do you have, Royal Scholar?”
“I’m afraid this is the last of my surprises.” He laid a thick sheaf on his desk.
“What is it?” I asked.
He opened it and spread out multiple documents. “Letters,” he said. “They were found decades ago by the last Royal Scholar, but they contradicted certain facets of the Morrighese Holy Text. Like me, he did not destroy rare texts, but they were an anomaly we didn’t understand.”
“So they were hidden away because they told a different history.”
He nodded. “These support what you just told me. It seems the revered father of our people, Jafir de Aldrid, was a scavenger who could neither read nor write when Morrighan met him. After they arrived here, he practiced his reading and writing skills by writing letters. I’ve translated about half of them.” He shoved the stack toward me. “These are his love letters to her.”
Love letters? “I think you’ve made a mistake. They couldn’t be love letters. According to Gaudrel, Morrighan was stolen by the thief Harik and sold for a sack of grain to Aldrid.”