The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,85
Who you believed him to be?” He pauses. “She made Elkisa act against her own will.”
I have no answer to that.
Matias sighs and shakes his head. “You must stay away, Nimh. Not unless you can come back with …” His eyes flicker toward North.
With the true Lightbringer. I must find some way to awaken his power—but with the scroll gone, so is the only clue the prophecy gave me to North’s destiny.
I find myself staring at my old teacher and friend, wishing I could touch him, wishing I could show my gratitude. I can’t help wondering if it will be the last time I see him.
The librarian’s eyes soften, as if he’s reading my thoughts. “I have seen leaders rise and fall and rise again in my time, child—all that matters now is that you are alive. I will send word when it is safe for you to return. Quickly, now—there is a way out just here.”
I follow him down through the stacks, North behind us. He pushes at one of the shelves, and it slides noiselessly aside. Behind it, the wall is marked with a shallow carving in the stone: a pair of circles, one inside the other, with a staring eye inside the smaller.
“I thought I knew all the tunnels and spy-walks,” I mumble, staring as Matias finds a hidden catch and a panel swings free at shoulder height with a faint grinding of stone, cobwebs trailing after it like tattered lace. “What is that symbol?”
Matias gives a helpless shrug, pulling one of his shelving trolleys over to serve as a means to climb up to the passageway’s opening. “Something from before the time when we began keeping records again. If you ignore the other passageways leading off this one and go straight, you will find yourself not far from the south river. Avoid the crowds.”
North makes a little sound, and when I look back at him, he’s got his pack off and is shrugging out of the black coat he wore to the feast. “This will help hide that red robe until we can find something else for you to wear.”
I slip the coat on, trying not to notice how it is still warm from his body, and how it smells a little of him. For a moment, I’m dizzy. It is, perhaps, the closest thing to an embrace that I’ve felt since I was five years old.
“Go, Nimh,” Matias says softly.
I whirl back around to face him. “But Inshara … what if she—”
“It’s taken me years to rid you of that habit. No more what-ifs.” His eyes are fond. I used to torture him with a constant stream of questions, most of them starting with that fatal phrase. What if I’m not the real goddess? What if I just say I manifested, and pretend? What if I did touch someone and no one else knew? What if …
When I continue to hesitate, Matias flaps one hand toward the passageway in the same gesture he always used to chase me out of the stacks at mealtimes when I was a child. “We’ve no time for this. I’ll be fine, Nimh—this Inshara won’t harm the only person who knows where everything is, not if she ever wants to consult a single prophecy or text.”
I swallow back my tears and nod. The opening in the wall is short and narrow, so North goes first to make sure his broader shoulders will fit. I watch him disappear into the dark hole in the wall, muttering oaths as his shoulders scrape past the narrow opening, and then climb up onto the top of the trolley myself.
I’m struck, strangely, by an old, old memory. I had climbed onto one of these trolleys as a child, despite having been told a dozen times by Matias never to stand on them, and was trying to use it to reach one of the higher shelves. Its wheels had shifted, and I had fallen, and ended up cracking a bone in my wrist. It was the first time I’d ever had to treat myself for a significant injury, for of course the healers could not touch me. I’d had to feel my own arm for the break, in too much agony to use magic to dull the pain, and then splint it and wrap it myself.
What I would not give, now, for the pain of a broken arm, if it meant not having to bear the pain of a broken heart.