The Unwritten King

20. Around Twilight

A storm had torn through the forbidden archive.

The storm was Nicholas, and he grew more disruptive by the day.

Four days, now. Not that he was counting or anything.

Four days of tearing books from the shelves, four days of ravaging his carefully-sorted piles until it wasn't clear where one ended and the next began. Four days since he had seen another human being for longer than it took to receive his daily meals or make the chaperoned trip to the bath, where he scrubbed himself raw in his haste to return to his work.

Four days since the dead-silent ride home with the king. Four days since Rayan apparently decided to fuck off into the ether.

Not that Nicholas was counting.

He could barely walk through the archive without stepping on the open pages of some memoir or anthology or history or essay or witchy cookbook or–

He managed, anyway. He tiptoed around with care, because even pissed as hell and invested in his studies to the point of obsession, Nicholas could appreciate that the past was not meant to be trampled. That made him think of Cici and the last book she'd leant him, on the Nazi book burning campaign, sitting half-read and severely overdue on his desk. It pissed him off all over again. He was tempted to stomp on the history at his feet just to spite her, say fuck you for sending him off to another world to get ghosted by an evil king. But the witches who had worked so hard to preserve it didn't deserve that.

The witches. Who were very real, and beautiful in a boorish way, and way too good at keeping secrets. Nicholas groaned from his heart, muffled into pages that had begun to blur together. That was how Mariam found him. Face-down in a craftbook about lacemaking, except maybe it was about centuries of systemic persecution. It was probably about lacemaking.

"Well aren't you a sight for sore eyes?"

The way he was laying, Nicholas imagined he looked like a swimming newt. Mariam's voice lilted on a laugh, so odds were she thought the same.

"My eyes are sore," he said. "How are you so quiet? Did you float down the stairs? Be honest, can you float?"

"I am perfectly loud." She settled beside him to rub his shoulder. "You are just so focused," she said, with a voice like she was cooing at a kitten.

"It's good to see you."

"You haven't quite seen me yet, jewel."

A page stuck briefly to Nicholas' forehead as he turned onto his cheek. It was good to see her. He tried to communicate this with a smile. She rubbed a few extra circles into his shoulder, so it must have looked pretty pathetic.

"Would it help to talk through it?"

"You don't want to hear it. It's all convoluted witch stuff."

"You'd be surprised."

Nicholas hesitated, wary of sounding as crazy as he felt to the only person who seemed to give a damn that he was still breathing. Or that he ate, if the bowl by his face was any indicator. He had left his untouched dinner upstairs, but here it was, subtly inching closer to his nose every time she nudged the tray with her toe.

"You can talk into the book, if that's easier."

Nicholas slotted his nose into the spine and gave it his best shot. He told Mariam about the Muck Moth, and the small weird somethings he had observed there. 

From brief glimpses of the ladies' hidden jewelry, he gathered that their magic was a system unto itself. Any individual witch only seemed to use two or three stones herself, but he had seen many different colors – many different stones. Definitely more than the five used by the rest of Caldora. The witches shared fewer in common, though; rarely had Nicholas seen the same stone twice.