The Way We Fall

Chapter 125 (Roche)

The library felt empty without Verita's pattering footsteps and hisses at nobles to stop running or violating the many rules of the library.

Roche had locked the doors. If the king tried knocking on them, she'd feed the man to Circe. She holed up in her chambers, snacking despondently on a hunk of bread as she flipped through several pages of her spellbook. There wasn't much information about the curse Circe had detailed, but from what Roche could understand, it was a powerful enchantment.

She'd need an especially strong reaction to pull the king out of the enchantment's thrall. Roche pinched the bridge of her nose. How was she going to explain this to the royals without revealing the very illegal spellbook and Striga in the library?

She stood, her joints popping loudly as she did so. She needed to figure out what would produce the strongest reaction in the king. He was quick to anger, but he'd been angered many times over the past few days without the enchantment breaking. Roche paced. There was hatred, but he'd fallen in love with what he hated most: inkblood.

That left despair, regret, and fear. Roche figured that there was no way the royal children would let their father be intimidated by anything, because apparently fear made Romulus look unkingly, so that left despair and regret.

Roche chewed her lip. She wasn't a huge fan of the king, considering that the man considered her existence to be against the laws of nature. This meant that Roche had no idea what would make such a cruel man despair.

Tigris was still out collecting taxes, which meant there was only one other person who could give Roche the answers she needed.

She placed a blank sheet of paper over the page from the spellbook. "Effier ol anneat," she hissed, watching the contents of the page ink themselves onto the blank sheet. Then, she pulled a cloak over her face and headed to the dungeons.

The knights weren't allowing any visitors considering that Verita was being tortured. Roche stood just out of sight, using her inkblood to make a stone skitter down the hall. One of the two guards on duty went to investigate the sound. Roche waited for him to step into the hall before she pressed a hand against one of the shadows warping in the flickering firelight.

"Uskoia mon kalid,"

The shadows leapt off the ground, wrapping around comfortingly Roche like a weighted blanket, concealing her from sight. She crouched, trying to match her motions to the tongues of flame dancing from the torches mounted on the walls.

The other guard waited in the room, alert now that his partner was gone. Roche prowled closer, feeling triumphant when her movements didn't garner any attention. When she was right beside the man, she placed a single finger to his temple and silently incanted, "Hyunid."

Before the man could spin around to investigate the touch, he was leaning back against the wall and snoring loudly.

Roche positioned him so that he wouldn't wake up with a crick in his neck before she crept into the dungeons. Somehow, the space seemed ever more dank and dark than when she'd last been there. She searched the many cells for her guardian's old, prone body, but she only found a few miscreants, the usual noisy drunks, bandits, and looters.

There was no sign of the elderly librarian.

Roche dreaded to think what that would mean.

She prowled deeper into the dungeons, noticing the cells becoming smaller and spread further apart. Tigris had negotiated Finn into solitary confinement. Perhaps he was somewhere in here.

The first cell she came across didn't have Finn, but another familiar face gazed back at her. Roche couldn't quite hold back her gasp.

"Verita?"